Comment 8 for bug 65683

This "bug" bites me all the time. Autofsck has another problem that's even worse, though, so I had to remove it: If Autofsck prompts that a disk needs checking, and I select "OK" on reboot, the system comes back up, checks the disks, then shuts down!! I'd rather sit through the disk checking with no warnings when I reboot than have the computer shut down. Really, though, cancelling a running fsck should be included in ALL linux distributions and having a tiny piece of software like Autofsck that has its own problems is not a solution.

I'm running Jaunty, and I boot verbose (I removed "quiet" and "nosplash" from my menu.lst) for other reasons. Pressing ESC, ctrl-C, ctrl-D, ctrl-alt-delete do nothing. (well actually ctrl-alt-del does cancel the fsck, but you have to press ctrl-d IMMEDIATELY afterwards (and I mean literally immediately) to avoid a reboot (which just triggers another round of fsck's)... and even if you DO manage to press that quick enough, there are still several daemons that don't start, like networking for example, that must be started manually). no networking, no ssh, no remote management, no server useability. This is quite a conundrum that could easily be solved by not disabling the ability to cancel and not implementing such a policy in future releases.

My /, /boot, and /home are on smaller high-availability RAID arrays, and not only that, my / is ReiserFS so is barely affected by this problem. Checking just those wouldn't take very long. The problem is I have nearly an additional 1.5TB of ext3 data across several drives in different RAID configurations. It's these checks that really kill me, and they could be all run while the system is fully up and running in runlevel 5. I don't want to change the frequency of checks, either, because if I don't NEED to use the box, I can just let it do its scheduled fsck and when it's finished, it's finished.

What would really be nice is if the functionality that should be there (ctrl-c to cancel on an ad-hoc basis) was still there. The decision to remove this feature was not fully thought out, and it should be there once again, as it always has been in Debian, RHEL, and used to exist in Ubuntu until somebody made the unwise decision to disable it.

Again, another piece of software, i.e. autofsck is NOT a valid solution.