Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Ubuntu Annoyances: Filesystem check after every 30 boot ups



Ubuntu forces drives to be checked once for every 30 times (default) the filesystem is mounted. This means that on an average, once every 30 bootups, the filesystem integrity is checked. Sometimes it takes minutes to complete this scan and the end-user is left waiting for the process to complete.

It is even more annoying when you are supposed to give a presentation and it takes your laptop ages to boot. Let's see how to get rid of this minor annoyance.

There are a couple of ways to do this

1. Enable/Disable file system integrity check for the next bootup,
Enable check
$sudo touch /forcefsck


Disable check
$sudo touch /fastboot



2. The above files are deleted after every boot up. For a more persistent solution, let us change the frequency of the checks. (ext2 and ext3 only)

Change the max-boot count to 600 boots (replace sda1. Hint: fdisk -l)
$sudo tune2fs -c 600 /dev/sda1


Change current count variable to 0
$sude tune2fs -C 0 /dev/hda1



Nice! You can relax now for 600 more boot ups. I would suggest keeping it at around 100 as it is always good to check the system integrity once in a while. For a more permanent solution, check AutoFsck

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