"forced check" when booting
 

I've installed Suse 7.3 and whenever I boot I see a message that the drive on which Linux has been installed wasn't successfully umounted (or something like that...) at the previous shutdown. It then apparently checks/scans the whole drive before continuing with the boot process.

Any advice as to what I can change or tweak to make this irritation go away?

Thanks
Joe

the most likely cause is that your system is not closing down properly. are you letting it turn itself of properly and such like?

Yes, I do it by the book :). Click on shutdown or reboot and keep my hands off the keyboard and mouse until it's time to login again. It's definitely not caused by me pulling the plug or anything similar.

Hi
Do you mean that you wait until your at the log-on screen again to shut down???

Here's the scenario:

I'm logged on & decide to shutdown or reboot. Click on the KDE button and click on the log out option (or something like that). The login screen duly appears. I click on shutdown and select either reboot or shutdown from the menu that appears.

When I select shutdown, the machine shuts down. No problem.

When I select reboot or when I boot after a shutdown, the machine boots and eventually comes to the point where it goes thru the "check forced" bit.

And that's the problem I'm trying to have solved.

Have you tried to make a manual fsck.
I recall that I have heard manual checking can sometimes work when the clean flag won't set on the hard drive.
At least it would probably show us if it is the system not shutting down properly or something else.

Try booting your suse with the rescue floppy/cd (don't know which route suse has chosen). Then try to run e2fsck /dev/hda1, that is if your linux partition is hda1.
Now shutdown with the command shutdown. I'm mixing all the different commands for shutdown on the systems I use so read man page for shutdown.

Now we have checked the drive but not mounted it. Now the clean flag on your hard disk should signal that the drive was unmounted cleanly. Try to reboot normally and see what happens.

Just for the sake of completeness...

The good people at Suse responded as follows to my query:

*****************************
Title: The Hard Disk Is Checked After Every Reboot

http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/jkoeke_fsck73.html
_______________________________________________________

Applies to

SuSE Linux: Version 7.3
Kernel: Version 2.4.10

Symptom

Your root partition is checked for errors after every
reboot.

Cause

The cause is a problem regarding the cooperation between the
standard kernel and LVM.

Solution

Login as user root.
Use any editor of your choice (e.g Pico) to modify the
following entry (line 164) in file /etc/init.d/boot :

if test "$fs" = / -a -f "$des" -a "$type" != "reiserfs"

Please change here the if query to:

if test "$fs" = / -a -b "$des" -a "$type" != "reiserfs"

The only change takes place in the option from -f to -b.
******************************
And that was the end of the forced check.