fsck error on reboot, doesn't tell user?

[Patrick McFarland]

I think I've found the biggest misfeature in Ubuntu's history.

I recently locked up my computer while writting to the harddrive, and caused 
possible corruption to the root partition (or at least, enough to make fsck 
on boot bitch about it). 

I shut down my computer for the night, and started it back up, and noticed:

a) any app that writes to /tmp or, well, anywhere else (this includes man, 
btw) no longer would work, bitching that / was read only;

b) fsck neglected to tell me in any useful fashion that / was corrupted and I 
should fsck manually (I found this out by rebooting with safe mode, watching 
to see if, indeed, / was fubar);

c) my gnome desktop was set back to default settings, probably because gnome 
couldn't write to /tmp.

Now, this is quite nutty behavior. The last time I noticed, Debian/Ubuntu 
asked to drop me to a root prompt so I could run fsck right there, instead of 
having to find out that / was fubar.

I'm not sure why this question asking was taken out (I'm assuming to make it 
more 'user-friendly'), but not only does it hide from the user that / is 
fubar, but it also causes serious problems down the road (not just because / 
is read only).

The only possible solution I can think of is user-friendly-ize the 
drop-to-root-and-fsck-manually process; not giving the choice at all is not 
better and/or user-friendly and/or useful.

-- 
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || diablod3 at gmail.com
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo,
Inc, 1989