Skipping fsck checks during boot with CTRL-C
July 31st, 2010 by lucas
According to Murphy’s law, the fsck check that happens once every n boots always happens at the worst time. By default, using CTRL-C to abort it causes fsck to exit with an error, and the filesystem to be remounted read-only. It’s easy to change that in /etc/e2fsck.conf:
[options] allow_cancellation = true
Doubter wrote on 07/31/10 at 7:01 pm :
But in Lenny (EXT3fs, of course) there is not such file by default, is it?
Lucas wrote on 07/31/10 at 8:25 pm :
yes, you need to create it
Alex wrote on 07/31/10 at 8:55 pm :
That’s exactly the reason why I’ve converted the last system to ext4 today – fs checks are waaay faster.
However, have you thought about filing a wishlist bug against e2fsprogs requesting this setting to be the default? I think this could save some embarrassing delays (conference, presentation, etc.) and should hurt nobody.
Who Ever wrote on 08/2/10 at 9:50 am :
So what happens if you do cancel? Does it happen again next boot? The manual page doesn’t say anything about it.
Lucas wrote on 08/2/10 at 1:43 pm :
Yes it’s just postponed to the next boot.
Jon wrote on 08/3/10 at 3:13 pm :
This has been a bug-bear for such a long time, I’ve often thought of investigating and trying to improve the behaviour but never managed. I think your suggestion above should probably be the default for installed systems.
RainCT wrote on 08/3/10 at 10:40 pm :
Thank you for this tip!
This should really be allowed by by default (like in Ubuntu)…
Minoru wrote on 08/6/10 at 11:38 pm :
Hey, that’s amazing! I got tired by that issue so much that I even disabled filesystem check on my netbook… I think that’s time to re-enable it :)
I’m intended to translate that tip to Russian and post in my blog (providing link to yours, of course). I hope you won’t mind.