[ubuntu-uk] Fsck forced on boot up due to date problems after update

[Farran Lee]

Hi Rob
just had that happen with my laptop.
Inside is a tiny battery that powers the BIOS memory (or something). My
laptop is awfully old, and the battery has finally gone flat. This means
that every time my laptop is disconnected from the mains, it forgets all
the settings I have made in the BIOS. It complains at me a lot, but I
have got round it.
The BIOS (as far as I am aware - I'm only 14, so don't quote me on this)
manages the system clock as well - consequently, it forgets the time and
date. Now, when I boot up, it complains that it has not had a system
check for several thousand days (last time I worked it out, it was over
316 years). This obviously cannot be the case! When an error is found on
the hd and the fsck reaches the end, it normally says something like
this to me: "Errors found on hda1! Linux is going down for reboot in 5!"
My guess is that all that needs to be done is to replace the battery. It
is only a tiny round [lithium-ion?] battery.
Hope this helped... as I said, I'm only 14, so I could be talking a load
of rubbish... :P
Farran

On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 21:34 +0100, Rob Beard wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've been trying to install Ubuntu 7.04 on my dad's Thinkpad R50e 
> notebook this evening with not much luck.
> 
> Basically my dad's had his laptop for a year and the hard drive 
> developed bad sectors just after the warranty ran out.  To complicate 
> things further, the installation files were on the hard disk itself 
> (good old Microsoft!).  Now I have got a set of install disks for the 
> laptop (my other half has exactly the same laptop) but I can't find 
> them, so to get my dad up and running again I decided to install Ubuntu 
> (okay, I'm hoping he moves over to Ubuntu).
> 
> Now this is where the problem starts.  I've installed Ubuntu 7.04 from a 
> Desktop CD, it all appears to install okay, I've partitioned the drive 
> as follows:
> 
> /	20GB Ext3
> /home	99GB Ext3
> swap	1GB Swap
> 
> I rebooted the machine after the install, so far so good.  Everything 
> booted up fine.  I then went to install the updates (about 126 updates), 
> again these installed fine.
> 
> I then rebooted again, and during the reboot the machine complained 
> about not having a disk check for about 49,710 days.  It ran through the 
> disk check and rebooted, it then on the second reboot said exactly the 
> same thing.
> 
> I checked the date and time, all were fine, I then reinstalled again.
> 
> On the second reinstall it did exactly the same as before, reporting 
> that the disk hadn't been checked for over 49,000 days, after the forced 
> fsck it rebooted and then appeared to boot okay.
> 
> I'm going to try Ubuntu 7.10 Beta, my dad goes away this weekend for a 
> week and I needed to get his machine working.  When he's back hopefully 
> I'll be able to put the full release of 7.10 on the laptop (along with 
> Windows if he really really wants it).
> 
> Just wondered though if anyone else had seen this problem?
> 
> Ta,
> 
> Rob
>