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
But in Lenny (EXT3fs, of course) there is not such file by default, is it?
yes, you need to create it
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.
So what happens if you do cancel? Does it happen again next boot? The manual page doesn’t say anything about it.
Yes it’s just postponed to the next boot.
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.
Thank you for this tip!
This should really be allowed by by default (like in Ubuntu)…
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.