I get the pinkish Ubuntu screen and a message such as "checking disk 1 of 4". I assume that it is doing an fsck. However, the time it takes does not seem to relate to the time it takes if I do a manual fsck (almost instantaneous) or fsck -c (several minutes to half an hour depending on the drive). I also wonder what is counts as a "disk". I have in the system:

sda1 - / 20 GB
sda2 - /home 10 GB
sda3 - swap 4 GB
sda4 - /data 115 GB

sdb1 - /quitelarge 750 GB

sdc1 - /veryhuge 1 TB

Ken

Yes, that is what is happening. Ubuntu is doing an fsck of the partition(s).
If you manually fsck the drive, and the drive is clean, then it will just report that. This is indeed very quick in my experience.
Obviously, when Ubuntu runs a fsck on a 1 terabyte drive, it will take a lot longer than doing a fsck on a 10-20GB drive.
Every partition on the system counts as a "disk".
Ext3/4 file systems are checked approximately every 30 boots, more or less.

You are correct - it is doing an fsck on one of your partitions. All linux-formatted partitions count as "disks" as far as fsck is concerned, with the exception of swap which doesn't have a "filesystem" as such.

How often fsck's happen can be set with tune2fs

The time taken to do a fsck depends on the filesystem used and the number (and size) of the files.

If you want to see exactly what is happening, next time you boot, when you see the grub menu, edit the kernel line to remove the quiet and splash options. Then you'll see the kernel messages (which IMHO are more interesting than that "Plymouth" thing anyway).

Or you could look at /var/log/messages and see what was fsck'd, and when, there.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks tredegar,

But of course this is Ubuntu 10.04 and there is no grub menu displayed at boot, and startup-manager does not work so I edited /etc/default/grub and commented out the quiet and splash lines. Ran update-grub and now I see a bunch of stuff flash by on boot - almost like an operating system

And on my next boot I observed it doing an fsck on a couple of my partitions including the 1 TB drive which took a while.

Thanks again,

Ken

Thanks for the reply tommcd. It appeared as I was typing a reply to the first reply. I have disposed of the splash screen and now can see things happening when I boot - which I seem to do too often with 10.04 - almost as bad as Windoze

Ken

Well, I am also running 10.04, and I do get a grub boot menu (maybe edit /etc/default/grub and you'll get one too) - it's useful if you have more than one OS, (linux of course ).

I'm not sure what "startup-manager" is, or why "it doesn't work".
But your problem seems to be fixed

If you only have Ubuntu on your computer, and no other operating system, you will not see the grub menu on boot up. If you wish to see the grub menu during boot up, hold sown the SHIFT key as the computer boots up and you will see the grub menu.
If you wish to see the grub menu every time the computer boots, then edit /etc/default/grub file and comment out (put a # in front of) the line:
And then run:
And you should see the grub menu every time the computer boots.
Se this from the Ubuntu wiki for reference:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#grub%2...efault/grub%29