fsck after improper shutdown
 

I need a reliable way to ensure that an embedded Linux system starts up correctly after a power loss. Right now, if power gets cut, on the next start I am prompted to fix the hard drive using "fsck /dev/hda5". After "fixing" several nodes and restarting, the system is okay again. What I really need is a way to do this without needing any human interaction. Once everything is setup, the system will not be accessible and will have to be self-maintaining. I'm not exactly sure what distribution is running on this machine, it came with the board, but it appears to have all of the normal linux functions. It is running kernel version 2.4.31 if that makes any difference. Thanks for any suggestions!

Can you investigate what filesystem the machine uses now and what different filesystems it can use? It seems that it doesn't use a journaling filesystem. If you can swith to use a journaling filesystem (such as ext3, reiserfs), it will not be necessary to fsck after power loss - journaling filesystems are designed to prevent data corruption in these events.