OpenBSD stop automatic boot check if / wasn't unmounted from a crash

taids · 04-12-2006, 01:20 PM

This one's been annoying me for a while now, and I've never been able to find the utility to change it, or any sites that show you how...

I've been running OpenBSD on an old machine for quite a while now, and it hosts various file shares and what not, but when I get a powercut (as I do from time to time due to being on a token-based electric meter), while booting back up, there is a warning given about / not being unmounted properly, and then it forces a disk check. With it being an old machine, and having slow hard disks in there, the check takes up to 6 minutes some times, which is quite inconvenient if I need to get back online in a hurry.

So the question is, how does one disable this forced disk check? I remember with moost Linux distros it was done with the tune2fs command (or similar) but OpenBSD doesn't use ext2/3 and the tunefs man page doesn't mention anything about changing boot check options.

taylor_venable · 04-12-2006, 06:55 PM

I don't care to test it by forcing my OpenBSD server to crash, but I believe you can easily do it by creating the /fastboot file. OpenBSD 3.8 has this line in /etc/rc:

Code:

if [ -e /fastboot ]; then
        echo "Fast boot: skipping disk checks."
elif [ X"$1" = X"autoboot" ]; then
        echo "Automatic boot in progress: starting file system checks."
        fsck -p
...

So it looks like you should be able to avoid disk checks by doing `sudo touch /fastboot`. But even if boot-up time is critical, is it really worth risking losing your disk contents for? Even if you haven't had any problems with filesystem corruption in the past, that doesn't mean it can't (or won't) happen in the future.