How to tell if volume is already dirty
 

Is there a command I can use to tell me if any volumes/drives/whatever are marked as dirty and will automatically run an e2fsck when I reboot the server?

Well a volume should only be marked as such if it wasn't properly unmounted at shutdown, and if it is dirty, then the system would have already checked it at boot.

So you wouldn't have dirty filesystems on a running system unless you had previously mounted a filesystem that wasn't in fstab and the system had a hard crash.

OK. I have a RAID 5 (setup in the BIOS) array which had one of the drives fail over to the hot spares because one of the other drives failed and threw a bunch of errors in the messages log. so i thought it might have marked it as dirty because of that. I know how to check if a volume is marked as dirty on a Windows server, thought there might be an equivolent command in linux, since i've had server automatically do a check upon reboot before, which i thought was because of hard drive problems. maybe not.

If you'd like to check manually, try `tune2fs -l`. It spits out a lot of useful info about your filesystem, including whether it's clean or dirty. As MS3FGX said, though, Linux systems check this at every boot, so if you reboot reasonably often, this isn't something you need to worry about often.

thanks, i'll check it out