To try to answer the question of whether we could simply disable the periodic fsck, I decided to ask Mingming Cao, one of the developers who has worked on ext3 and later, ext4. I just got the following: "Periodically fsck ext3 is still needed, even if ext3 is a journalled fs. kernel code vm/fs could be buggy, or disks IO errors, which cause filesystem metadata corrupted silently, this can't be detected by simply replaying the journal log. Well how often should ext3 do the sanity check is really depend on the customer's priority, whether they would like to trade some of the boot up time with more confident of the fs's healthy. It's probably a good idea to warning the user that the scheduled fsck is coming and let user to decide whether they want to do it or delaying it." That answers it for me. <div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 21, 2007 9:31 AM, Phillip Susi <<a href="mailto:psusi@cfl.rr.com">psusi@cfl.rr.com</a> > wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d"> </div>I still say we should just disable the checks entirely. No other filesystem still does this nonsense. It's just a holdover from ext2, which had it as a leftover from ext, which had it out of convention from minix, which did it as purely pedantic ( or did it actually perform some maintenance then that needed done periodically? I can't remember ). On the other hand, your solution looks like a great improvement. </blockquote></div> -- Slingshot - a unique game everyone enjoys - and it's free :-) <a href="http://www.slingshot-game.org">http://www.slingshot-game.org</a>