Sometimes my girlfriend will get mad and inproperaly shutdown my linux laptop. Well when it starts back up it doesn't do the scandisk thing how can I get it to scandisk.

Nullhellfire,

"scandisk" in linux would more commonly be known as "fsck", which means "File System Check". Generally when a linux distro boots up it will mount the drives and note if partitions were not unmounted properly when the machine powered down. If they were not then generally a fsck is 'forced' to verify all the data and errors are automatically corrected. If you have a gui that comes up immediately on boot (like in Ubuntu or SuSe) you may not even see this taking place. Also, in some journalled filesystem like reiserfs it won't auto fsck as long as the journal matches up with what it sees on the partition.

If you want to manually run a check of your partitions try going into single user mode by adding "single" to the end of your kernel line in grub before booting or boot off of a rescue CD. When you get started up you will be able to run 'fsck /dev/hdd1' from the command line, where hdd1 is the drive and partition you wish to scan.

Three issues with that, but the info is generally correct:

1. You don't use Slackware, so please preface things like the above with: "In distro FOO, you..." . Otherwise, confusion to a newbie is guaranteed.
2. Slackware uses lilo by default, not grub. And depending on how it was setup during install, there may not be any menu.
3. CD1 of the Slackware install set is a 'liveCD'. Just follow the instructions for booting your install at the 'boot:' prompt. (Instructions are printed right above where it says 'boot:')

This is NOT a flame on you, NSWKim, but please know that different distros use different bootloaders and runlevels. For example, if you edited initab in your distro, what does runlevel 3 do? Or 4? In Slackware, 3 is CLI, and 4 is for the GUI. grub is available to install on Slackware, but a newbie prob won't have it installed.

It's mostly a question of "Ask first, assume last"

If she is doing this by just pressing the powerbutton on your laptop, recompile your kernel to include the ACPI stuff, that way when she presses the button it will do a proper shutdown, and you can laugh at her foiled childishness.