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

[Michael Holloway]

On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 09:11 +0100, David Restall - System Administrator
wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
> > I've been trying to install Ubuntu 7.04 on my dad's Thinkpad R50e 
> > notebook this evening with not much luck.
> 
> Snip...
> 
> > 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.
> 
> It isn't the battery - I don't know what it is but it's much nastier
> than a dead battery :-(
> 
> Doing some simple maths :-
> 
> 2 ^ 32 = 4294967296
> MAXINT = 4294967296 - 1 = 4294967295
> 4294967295 / 86400 = 49710.2696181
> 
> this is unlikely to be a battery problem.  It looks as if some routine
> is not reading the date correctly and it is returning either 0 or MAXINT.
> For those that haven't clicked, 4294967295 is biggest number that can be
> represented in a 32 bit word and 86400 is the number of seconds in a day.
> Standard UTC uses the same 32 bits, that's why we have to worry about 2038
> (1970 + 49000 days).
> 
> Quite what the actual problem is, I don't know but I wouldn't be looking
> at changing batteries, I'd suspect some hardware incompatibility.
> 
> Some numbers just ring funny :-)
> 
> TTFN


Hi

Honestly I've installed Ubuntu countless times, mostly servers. Since
7.04 i seem to get this every time! On different machines and VMs. I
assumed this was just a "lazy" way of forcing a disk check after its
been installed. 

So all i do is install, apt-get upgrade, reboot, reboot... and then all
is fine after that... almost like a post install intentional mess that
sorts itself out.

Later,
Michael