fsck and system crashes

[Jan Kokoska]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 00:05 -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > It's called journaling filesystem.  Mandrake should also use one by
> > default.  Shouldn't be any reason to run fsck unless something REALLY
> > bad has happened.
> 
> actually noticed the other day that Ubuntu did do a fsck after my 30th reboot.
> On my 30gb it didn't take that long so I didn't really care, and
> actually think it would be a good idea to do automatically after a
> unclean shutdown just to be on the safe side of things.

The idea behind journaling is to avoid precisely that. After crash all
it needs to do is to restore the journal, which is reasonably fast and
doesn't prolong starting services - you will find that very convenient
on a network server.

fsck is still run after n-th mount (it counts mounts, not reboots) of
the filesystem, the number being set at random while creating the
filesystem. Can be changed by "tune2fs -cN /dev/hdX", N=0 disables it
altogether.

Jan