It feels like half an hour

I did not time it. I cannot see the clock on the computer with fsck running :banghead:

I skipped breakfast to clean my kitchen, and when I came back it was still running.

Perhaps it is slow since I often have >99% of the drive full.



But the real question is still why is allow_cancellation not working anymore. If it could be aborted, I could just skip fsck rather than breakfast

I know it doesn't answer your question but, out of interest, are you using ext3 or ext4, and what size is your filesystem?

I too have never seen a scheduled file check take anything over a matter of a minute or two (usually much less) on my various ext4 filesystems (totalling about 50GB).

ext3:

Usually there is less free space, but I had to delete a lot, before the dist-upgrade could start

Ok, thanks. ext4 usually produces faster fsck's (see e.g. https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.p...owto#Fast_fsck).

It may not be directly related to your question, but keeping your disk at that state of almost full capacity is not particularly great for the efficient operation of ext3/4 and your system in general.

Personally, if you cannot ctrl-c the filesystem check, I would turn scheduled checks off altogether and run them manually to your own schedule.

As a side note: the versions of RHEL that now do not run scheduled fsck also default to XFS file systems. Before that the default was EXT4. EXT3 is considered somewhat obsolete.

One can convert a file system from EXT3 to EXT4 in place, although you get more of the advantages faster with initial creation at EXT4. I do NOT recommend any conversion in your case, as conversions are more risky the less free space your drive has by percent. Your percent of free space is pretty low for ANY operation, making EVERYTHING higher risk!

Guess that will have to do.


But I have to keep my files somewhere. I do not have a tool to move them away



It gets worse every day

How easy it is to move things away depends upon what those files are and what they are used for. There are many online storage options that are free or cheap that might help. Google drive, one box, box, dropbox, bitcasa, Evernote, Mega, and Skydrive immediately come to mind. If such storage is not appropriate, you may be reduced to adding a drive or replacing the current drive with a larger drive.