Can you force a dirty volume to mount anyway?
 

Have a volume that i'm running e2fsck on and it keeps restarting, finding more stuff, restarting, over and over. it hasn't made it past Pass 1 yet.

I'm assuming after every pass its in better shape than it was the previous one. Is there a way to have the server start up and not force a check on it and mount it, even though it will probably say its still dirty?

Do you have a forcefsck on your root partition? If so, remove it. Also, you could comment out the e2fsck line in /etc/rc, if it is there. However I do recommend not doing this....

I'll have to look. Is forcefsck just a file on root? or would it be at the root of each volume?

I dont really want to do this either, and probably won't. sounds like a very bad idea. but figured i'd ask just in case

Yes, a VERY bad idea... LOL

And it would be a file on /

I think you are deep into the brown smelly stuff . . . e2fsck makes great big waves in that as it passes by :-/.

Boot on an installation disk, if you want my advice, and have a look from there. You can do run e2fsck from there. I would start by running badblocks

badblocks -p 1 /dev/whatever_It_Is
You can safely try
mount -o ro /dev/whatever_It_Is /mnt
ls /mnt/lost+found

That should show you an empty directory. I bet it won't. If it picked up a lot, run another pass.
Then try e2fsck. Your disk sounds snookered. get the data backed up - never mind reinstalling.

Thanks guys. I'm just trying to figure out the best way to attack this, saving the most time of mine and preventing the longest downtime for users.