Two days ago I installed the latest version of my sole OS--> it's now MX-17 (64 bit, run in KDE mode). After all seemed to be well following the installation, I noticed that in those boot lines that fly by when the desktop tower's turned on there's mention of "recovering journal". This continues now even 2 days after the installation of the OS.

I thought it might be useful to run e2fsck to check and perhaps fix what might be bad or wrong. But I've never used e2fsck and have read in the man that a partition examined by e2fsck has to be unmounted first.

If I want e2fsck to examine all partitions in perhaps a single investigation (if that's possible and if that's how it's done), do I run telinit to drop from run level 5 to - I think - run level 3 and then use the command line for e2fsck? Does dropping down to run level 3 make all partitions unmounted?

If I'm told here to remain in run level 5, then open konsole, log in as su, and run e2fsck, can I unmount the root partition to check it or will that not be possible since e2fsck resides there?

[My ' / ' is /dev/sda1, 'extended partition' is /dev/sda2, 'swap' is /dev/sda5, 'home' is /dev/sda6, and 'data' is /dev/sda7 ]

Personnaly I use XFS for years without any flaws, I never liked Ext

ext filesystems automatically run fsck if required at every mount (by default).
If this happens continually, I'd suggest you install smartmon-tools and run smartctl over the device to see if it is beginning to fail.