Hi all,
I have been trying to find some mailing list where fsck is discussed. I browsed through http://lists.debian.org/completeindex.html as well as http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ but couldn't find anything. Even looked up the wiki at ubuntu.com but unable to find any relevant thread on this. I'm much of a newbie when it comes to using fsck or any of the e2fsprogs. I also searched for documentation on debian as well with google with 'fsck howto' but there isn't any formative guide to this. Atleast I haven't been able to find

Kernel used : 2.6.15-generic
filesystem used :- ext3
HDD :- 80 GB IDE Samsung 4500 rpm
OS :- Ubuntu Feisty 7.04

I have 2 partitions a / & /home (both are primary partitions) , after checking the file-system every time it says fsck died with error status 1. This is fsck 1.49 version. I wouldn't want my filesytem to fail at any point in time. Don't know whether its a bug or is my system has some issue which needs to be fixed?

Now I heard that one could use the live CD to boot & then fix it. But no clear idea how to move forward on that. I tried looking at the man page & frankly they are too technical for me. I know that the info. provided is very much incomplete but if you can guide me through the process or can point me to some resource where I can get some more info. on the same would be very much appreciative.

this is the message thrown out by fsck and fsck exited with error status 1 afaik this means fs errors fixed.but why does it shows 49710 days ?


please ensure baby steps if you do give me directions as I'm new to this world. Something like :-

<command> - flags (if any)
the kind of output that should be or logic behind it.

This would enable me to understand what I am doing and give as much complete information as I can in order to resolve this issue. Looking forward to comments, suggestions, flames on this.
Keep up the good work. Cheers!

I can atleast explain the 49710 days thing to some degree..
The filesystems store a counter somewhere, somehow, which keeps track of how long it has been since a given filesystem was checked for errors. Now, let's say you have a bad shutdown or some such thing, and then reboot; when the time comes during boot, the system will begin to fsck the filesystem before it mounts it. fsck is done when the filesystem is not mounted. When it finishes checking/fixing the filesystem, the system wants to save the new counter setting, as well as perhaps the system time to the hardware-clock, before rebooting. But it can't, because as mentioned, the filesystem is not mounted. SO, we now have a fresh clean filesystem, but the counter wasn't reset and saved. On reboot, the system sees that the filesystem has apparently gone 49710 days since being checked, and checks it again; finding no errors, it then mounts the filesystem read-write and the system progresses as normal. Now, when the machine shuts down, the counter has been updated properly, and the system-time gets saved properly, and no problems happen.
I guess the maximum time that a system can possibly keep track of as far as filesystem-checks, is 49710 days, which is what gets reported by default if the filesystem has been cleaned and has no counter entry at all.
As for why fsck is exiting with an error-1, I don't know.. But running fsck -v might give some more information. the -v is for 'verbose' which makes fsck more talkative, hopefully giving you more information.
I use an older version of fsck than you do, so I can't say update your version... Perhaps googling 'linux fsck error 1' would provide more information?

http://www.go2linux.org/node/108

UPDATE: According to this link and several others, when fsck exits with an error 1, it means filesystem errors were corrected. In other words, if this is the case, it's nothing to worry about.
However, if you are constantly needing to fsck on many reboots, something else is in need of attention.

Thank you for your kind words & guidance GrapefruiTgirl , while I also gathered l8ter on that error 1 means file system errors were corrected it doesn't still explain why does it die each time. This happens each time when I make sure that fsck runs on next boot. Looking forward to comments, suggestions, additions to this.