i know this has been asked before, but nobody seems to give an answer to it.

i installed redhat 7.x and allowed it to partition my harddrive (with the exception of hda1 my windows partition). every thing worked fine.

i began to hate redhat, as it was slow, and altered around so much that i didn't feel like i was really running linux. so i switched to slack 8.

i used the same partitions that redhat created. every thing worked fine. slackware rules, very stable, very fast. but i wanted ximian evolution and i dont like working with source code. i like ximian in general..

i switch to suse 7.3, again still using the partitions that redhat created......
every time to computer boots up it says something to the extend of

/dev/hda2 was not cleanly unmounted , check forced
runs fsck
then says
(0.2 % non-contiguous)
at the time i had no clue what that ment, i just ignored it

now it is saying 0.4 % non-contiguous,... gdm is not working correctly, root no longer has the .profile or whatever it uses to set your prompt and sort by colors in a terminal. gnome wont start, xdm cant find a display. all random problems are happening...

i ran /etc/rc.d/rc 3 to go into single usermode, im just guessing that that is how you do it... it looked like it was shutting down half way or so.. I unmounted /dev/hda2 and ran

fsck /dev/hda2 -y

if i can remember correctly that gave me errors about the superblock. something about being over 1024...

eventually it worked, either fsck or e2fsck reboot, did the same thing, .4% non-contiguous, but everything seems to be working.

what to do???

This error with 1024 cylinders. It's important only if you're using older versions of lilo (it couldn't boot from high cylinders, but it's now fixed).

The '.4% non-contiguous' message is not an error, but just a notification of the status of fragmentation of that partition. No action is required to fix this. As long as the partition passes the fsck check, you're in good shape. Hope this helps. -mk

ok, is there any way to get it to stop running fsck every single time it boots?

And how come i have random stuff getting messed up?

You must run fsck, this includes all versions and varieties of fsck, in single user mode. If you run fsck in any of the multi-user modes, you will get exactly what you're experiencing. You can enter single user (maintenance) mode by typing shutdown now. You might want to do a manpage on fsck to check on how you handle superblock errors. Good luck. -mk

Start over one more time, but this time use the Reiser Filesystem. It takes care of itself! (an oversimplification but true).

If linux says "filesystems not cleanly unmounted", the filesystem is not unmounted when shutting down.
So: Does there appear any notice about unmounting your filesysystem when shutting down?

i did not notice any messages about it not unmounting correctly. Normally while it shuts down it shows the status of each process on the right in either green (good) or red (bad). everything was green, everytime.

i have also tried going into single user mode and manually typing

umount /dev/hda2

it didn't give me any errors and appeared to be unmounted. Still i get the same message during startup.

If possible, start from a system disc which starts a system without using a partition of the hard disk. If you've got such a rescue system and have booted it, enter:
e2fsck /dev/hda2
Normally it should not do anything, but in your case it should perform a file system check and printing something like "not umounted cleanly"