In my case, Ubuntu 18.04 running on AWS, the problem was as follows:
1. /etc/fstab had 0 in the 6th (passno) field. I presume this is the default
that AWS places there, or maybe this is determined by the Ubuntu template on
AWS.
2. According to a comment that I found on Stack Overflow, this is used by
mkinitramfs to decide not to put fsck in the initrd. This is *in no way*
obvious.
3. Without fsck in the initrd, it can't run the fsck, so it just prints a
message instead. This message tells you that a fsck is recommended, but it
doesn't tell you why it hasn't done one.
To fix this:
1. I changed /etc/fstab to have a "1" in the passno field
2. update-initramfs -u
3. reboot, and the check runs as expected.
I think the following changes should be made:
1. There should be a console warning during startup if the root volume cannot
be checked because fsck is not available.
2. If /etc/fstab is coming from an Ubuntu-controlled template, then passno for
the root volume should be set to 1. I know that AWS will fail to boot the
instance if the fsck goes interactive, necessitating manual repairs, but surely
failing to boot the instance is better than silently running on a corrupt root
filesystem.
3. This should be in some documentation somewhere. The fact that mkinitramfs
will exclude fsck from the initrd if it thinks you don't need it is
particularly obscure. If there is some kind of "getting started with Ubuntu on
AWS" then this should be in there.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1797282
Title:
fsck not running at all on reboot
Status in systemd package in Ubuntu:
Confirmed
Bug description:
After upgrading some servers from 16.04 to 18.04 I'm met with a MOTD
that says:
*** /dev/xvda1 should be checked for errors ***
I added "fsck.mode=force" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in
/etc/default/grub before running 'sudo update-grub'. I also verified
that fsck was present in /boot/grub/grub.cfg afterwards, before
rebooting the server.
Surprisingly I was met with the same error message in MOTD when
logging in. I then ran tune2fs to see when the last check was
performed and this is the output:
$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/xvda1 | grep checked
Last checked: Wed Sep 12 16:17:00 2018
I then tried to change mount count to 1 with tune2fs -c 1 /dev/xvda1,
but after another reboot I was still met with the same error message
and the timestamp for last checked was unchanged.
I have the same problem on all the servers that was upgraded from
16.04 to 18.04, but also on a new server installed directly with
18.04.
In should be mentioned that the servers are AWS EC2 instances, so I
have no way of trying to run fsck from a liveusb.
Another user has reported the same issue here:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2403368
I'm not quite sure what information is needed, but attached are some
basic information about the system.
Please let me know if you need any any other outputs or logs.
Edit1: I tested fsck.mode=force on my laptop running Ubuntu 18.04.1
LTS (Xubuntu) and it works fine. Seems to be related to the server
edition.
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