Annoying disk check

[danielferber]

Once again, like it uses to happen twice or three times a week, I boot kubuntu and it claims that my disk has been mounted 30 times and requires a long time and battery consuming disk check, although we all know and agree that there is no use for this check.

So I have some non technical questions to the Ubuntu guys.
1) Do you really believe that my time is that valuable that I can afford waiting 10 or 15 minutes when I want to boot my laptop?
2) Checking every 30 times? I seems that the file system installed by Ubuntu is everyting but reliable, or it would not need that many annoying periodic checking. Just to be safe, I will store my important files on a windows partition...

Please dont sent me some mysterious command line that disables disk check... I can google and figure out by myself. But I expected, as Ubuntu advanced, this kind of silly problem should already be solved.

I know you guys are working hard and that there are many annoying problems to solve, like Kubuntu not being able to manage any kind of network not being able to manage battery on laptop.

I really feel like installing another distro, unfortunately. This is a petty, because I already have hacked so much and spent so much time to make my Kubuntu at least usable.

[claydoh]

Re: Annoying disk check

3 or 4 times a week? If you are rebooting that often, then yes there are a couple of methods to change this behavior, one via the control center, the other via a config file edit. google will show you the way and what the settings should be. No weird command line stuff.

this behavior is a standard linux thing in my experience. It is preventative in nature, not due to stability issues, so it is not 'silly' to most people. It has allowed me to save data from a couple of drives before they were to far gone to recover anything. But I don't have a laptop, and I probably would not like the constant disk checking if I rebooted often. But how would any OS know that it is installed on a laptop, server, or a simple desktop?? You often gotta do some tweaking on any OS installed from scratch (as in non-OEM manufacturer disk)

[danielferber]

Re: Annoying disk check

I really boot my laptop often. On windows, I can leave the lap on standby for a week on battery, but on linux it will not hold for one day. Even worse, Kubuntu is not able to manager power properly. When I want to save battery, I have to turn off my laptop.

After all, this is a simply usability issue. And I think that increasing the interval of disk checks would not put my data in risk. Why not check every 100 times? 30 is really an exaggerated short number. Better, the check could be scheduled in time intervals instead of number of mounts. Or even much better, the whole issue could be solved temporarily by allowing the user to cancel and postpone the check for a more convenient moment.

But independent how the disk check is scheduled, I wonder, assuming that the computer was not shut down suddenly, or that there was not power or hardware failure, why should data get corrupted and therefore require a diskcheck?

[Rog131]

Re: Annoying disk check

the whole issue could be solved temporarily by allowing the user to cancel and postpone the check for a more convenient moment.

This may interest you:

Bonager: The Boot Scan Manager
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=295262

Bonager is an easy way to manage that unpredictable and sometimes very annoying disk scan that happens when the computer is turned on.

When installed, you take control of when you want that disk scan to occur. You even receive a warning before the next scan happens so that you are not surprised by it. And of course, you are given the option to postpone the scan...

Links

HowTo: Change disk checking/fsck at boot frequency
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=300477

Bonager: The Boot Scan Manager
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=295262

[claydoh]

Re: Annoying disk check

My guess as linux is basically originally a server OS, 30 mounts (not boots, mind you, but disk mounts) was deemed a decent interval. Which on a system of those types could be a very long time between checks.

I get a check on my main system about once a month, which is about how often I used to run a disk check in Windows.

There are hundreds of possible ways there could be corruption, from the obvious hardware problems to power spikes to worn IDE cables, on and on and on. Just being able to dynamically mount and unmount drives allows a chance of something bad happening but usually the filesystem itself handles that. So simply change the behavior to what you want.

Until hardware manufacturers tell the world how they do things to get suspend/sleep/power management to work, the volunteers who work on all the various linux distros will always have to reverse engineer how it is all done. it wasn't until very recently that any laptop related features were supported well at all. I would suggest searching for linux info for your specific laptop as you may well find one distro has better luck than another on that particular hardware. I do know that the ubuntu developers are very keen to get all latops supported, even so far as to break some scanner support (mine in particular) in order to get some suspend routines to work better.

http://www.linux-laptop.net/
http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html

you may find info you can use in these links