Startup in Karmic with unclean filesystems leaves system in a wrong state
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
mountall (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
With Karmic when you start up with previously unclean file systems, the fsck for these filesystems seems to happen in the backgound while the startup continues on. So you can be in a state where you are able to login but the system can't find the home directory e.g. (as I put those on a separate filesystem). This is very annoying, when filesystems are unclean the system should first fsck them and wait until all required filesystems are mounted.
The workaround is to boot in safe mode, drop to the shell, wait until the fsck is ready, and then usually startup X yourself.
Error messages:
When booting via the workaround after you drop to the shell... if you then do a "mount -a" you get something as:
mount /dev/sda5 already mounted or /media/sda5 busy
If you then check with "fuser /dev/sda5" you see something as follows being executed:
fsck.ext3 -a -C 11 /dev/sda5
I tried this out on a newly installed Karmic system, without any additional configuration changes. In my view whenever the system finds an unclean filesystem it should make sure it's clean (and mounted) before continuing.
Why is dropping to a shell a good solution? Doesn't the fsck eventually finish and then you can access your separate partition? It seems much better to give the user a fast boot and most of their desktop (sans corrupted home directory) than to just give them a shell with no home directory.