In my understanding, the ext3 journalling filesystem was supposed to prevent lengthy (and frightening) fsck checks after crashes / hard reset. I'm running Mandrake 9.1 on ext3 filesystems, yet after hard resets, I get the following message on the following bootup:
If I press Y, fsck starts for a first pass, fixing small errors such as inode dtimes. Then it asks me if I want to repair errors, and if I press Y again, fsck run a second time, deleting inodes, etc. Exactly what I thought ext3 would prevent.
After some discussion with a friend, I realized that ext3 support is not compiled in the mdk9.1's stock kernel, but rather compiled as a kernel module. Thus, when the root filesystem is mounted in r-o mode at boot-up, the ext3 module is not yet loaded, and thus is mounted as an ext2 filesystem. And if it was not cleanly unmounted, fsck is triggered, before the journal could have been replayed.
On an obscure forum :D, I read that one should answer 'N' to fsck in order to wait for the ext3 module to be loaded. When remounting the root filesystem in rw mode, ext3 would then be loaded and the journal could then be replayed, without any need to run fsck.
Thus, I made a test. I *purposely* did a hard reset just to see. When I was asked the above question, I didn't press Y. I then got:
This is, as far as I can tell, the habitual first fsck pass where inode dtimes are fixed. Afterwards I get:
First of all... What does the "reboot linux" mean? That Linux just rebooted? That would be surprising. That I have to reboot linux? Well, I'm certainly not hard-resetting my computer between two fsck passes! Second, what should a Mandrake 9.1 + ext3 user answer to this question? I was too chicken to risk running my system with a corrupted filesystem, so I pressed Y.
The interesting thing here is that, unlike when I press Y within 5 seconds at the first question, I got no second fsck pass there (maybe there just wasn't any error?). The boot-up just continued normally, remounting the root filesystem in rw mode. And later:
Well. Can someone tell me what's going on? Should I press Y or N to fsck questions? If I should press N, does that mean that it's something that Mandrake overlooked?