Ok, there's a forced harddrive check during boot time, and I just want to bypass it. I'd let it go, but it is painfully slow. Probably takes about 20-30 min to finish, but the thing is, it keeps on restarting it self. Like it keeps rerunning over and over again. It did it twice then three times, then I decided to go to sleep and when I woke up it's still doing it. What? I rebooted to see what would happen, and of course, it has to do the forced check again. What's going on? BTW, it used to be MUCH faster before. Like maybe 1 min check or less so I don't know what happened. I reinstalled slack and it still has the same problem. I think maybe it's because these last few times I've been using a swap partition?

What filesystem are you using, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, etc? Does it ever finish the filesystem check and boot up?

I'm guessing your problably using ext2 or ext3 and it sounds like you have a corrupted filesystem. Reinstalling should have taken care of that, so that might indicate a problem with the hard drive itself. Download the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility from their website and thoroughly check the drive for problems.

If your using reiserfs, the root partition should have the "notail" option in the fstab entry or you can get problems with filesystem corruption. Here's what mine looks like:

/dev/hdf8 / reiserfs notail 1 2

I reinstalled Slack again and yes I was using ext2. This time I didn't activate a swap partition and now the hdd check is 10-20x faster. Maybe it really was the swap? It doesn't seem to useful since I already have 512mb, so I might just delete the swap.

edit

I noticed switching from 2.4.26 to 2.6.7 made the check slower. Why is this? Is there an option in the config to make the check faster?

If you really want to speed things up try using reiserfs. It has a better journaling system and doesn't have to go thru the filesystem checks that ext2 does. I switched to reiserfs from ext3 about 18 months ago and never looked back. Just remember the notail option for your root filesystem.
I don't understand how enabling swap should slow down your fsck. 512MB is a lot of ram but you might find yourself out of memory if you are doing some intensive multitasking.