> Well any number of things, but the most recent was a prolonged power > outage.
It is important to differentiate between expected fsck activity and unexpected. If you are running without write caching turned on (which is the default), a power outtage will constitute a crash from which a file system cannot guarantee to recover unless it takes measure to punch through the write cache at appropriate moments. If you machine shutdown softly as a result of the UPS communicating that power was running out, you "should" not have to fsck (barring other issues in the past). fsck need in these cases would indicate a software bug, or a hardware problem. If on the other hand your machine just lost power when the UPS finally died, you are relying on luck for recovery if you're on ufs/reiserfs/xfs/etc. Some environments will correctly handle this (e.g., ZFS), but most won't. The problem being that drive write caching will prevent the file system from guaranteeing ordering of certain critical operations that must be ordered in order to guarantee successfull recovery to a consistent state. That said, you are not supposed to need to answer interactive questions on boot for all cases of expected inconsistencies. If you are getting prompts as a result of unexpected inconsistencies, that indicates *something* is wrong. -- / Peter Schuller PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.scode.org
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