Automatic fsck

[Alexander Jones]

2008/8/12 Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Paul S <paulatgm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been bitten bad by e2fsck where it's borked my system such that
>> I've had to reinstall.  Since I don't want to be forced into that again,
>> I'm trying to disable it permanently and take my chances on losing a
>> file here or there.
>
> I was under the impression that it's less likely to be "a file here or
> there" and much more likely to be "corrupted partition" which would
> lead to having to reinstall in many cases, but that fsck'ing was there
> to fix problems before they boil all the way up to corrupting the
> partition table.  I'm not sure what kind of problems a fsck could
> cause, but I know what it can fix.  It fixed "system can't boot
> because Vista shifted Ubuntu's inodes to all sorts of wrongness" a few
> times.  I do not recommend a Linux/Vista dual boot.

There is something /very/ wrong with Linux if a filesystem state can
trigger something to break the MBR. I dare say, in fact, that there is
no way a filesystem problem can corrupt the partition table.