Hi I just set up my nix box and i'm having trouble with fsck running on every boot. I get the error message, " /dev/hda2 was not cleanly unmounted..<blah blah blah>"

I'd imagine I could resolve this by sticking in a umount /dev/hda2 into some script file or whatever, but I don't know which one to mess with.
Thanks for any help.

I also tried giving a umount command before I used the shutdown command but it gave me an error message saying that it was busy or something.

Before you shutdown, are you running any applications that are relying upon hda2? Like if you have a music playing app, is it connecting to that drive for the music or anything like that?

Nah i'm not even in X anymore when I shutdown. I log out of x, then at the command prompt, I try unmounting and I get the busy error.

Can you try running lsof /dev/hda2 just prior to shutting down the box to see what is still open?

Could you post the contents of your fstab file, /etc/fstab?

What distribution are you using?

-----------------------
Steve Stites

Contents of Fstab:
/dev/hda2 / auto defaults 1 1
aufs / aufs defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 # AutoUpdate
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
/dev/hdb /mnt/hdb iso9660 noauto,users,exec 0 0 # AutoUpdate
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs-3g auto,noatime,users,suid,dev,exec,locale= 0 0 # AutoUpdate
/dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3 swap auto,defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat noauto,noatime,users,suid,dev,exec 0 0 # AutoUpdate


When I try typing lsof /dev/hda2 before shutting down, the cursor blinks down but nothing prints out.

During shutdown it looks like its trying to auto unmount hda2, but it gets a busy error.

*bump* Anyone?

There's nothing obviously wrong with what is shown there. Have you tried manually shutting down daemons and seeing if any of them hang? Can you use telinit 1 to change to single user mode successfully? If that works does the shutdown from there work properly?

I don't think you can manually unmount /dev/hda2 as it is your root partition (according to your fstab)!

That error message:
indicates that your previous Linux boot was not properly shutdown, and that the system will run a fsck on it to check for errors/corruptions in its file structure.
Some distro's prompt for a Y/N to run the fsck!
If the fsck is not run, Linux may or may not prompt again on the next boot.

You should probably let the fsck run as it is a check for corruption in the fs stucture.

If the system is repeatedly displaying the error message even after running the fsck, then you may have to boot from a Live-CD and run fsck on /dev/hda2 (easiest path), else try to fix the boot script that run fsck (more work).
You cannot run fsck on the root partition when it is in use (which will be the case if you boot from the hard drive) as it cannot run against a mounted partition (or r/w one anyways)!