user must run fsck by hand on FS corruption detected at boot

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Today my edgy computer failed to boot properly; it dumped in text mode, saying that one of my partitions was not properly unmounted; then fsck failed, and i was dumped to a shell with a dire warning about filesystem corruption.
rebooting, the same message came back again, and again a shell.

the only way to get the computer to continue booting was to type in the shell:
fsck -y /dev/hda6

I think this is not intuitive ;-)
99.9999% of users of ubuntu, if they find out how to run fsck at that prompt, will say YES to every of fsck's suggestions, only a few kernel hackers would know enough to not follow the defaults in fsck.

so i suggest that instead of dumping the user to a shell, something like that is displayed:

"Serious filesystem corruption detected; Press <Enter> for automatic recovery, <F12> for manual recovery (expert mode)"

If the user presses enter, fsck -y is ran on the partition where the corruption occured. If the user presses F12, he is dumped into a shell as is the case now. btw, after the fsck -y, all appears fine, and i think i didn't loose anything.

[Emmanuel Touzery (emmanuel-touzery)]

more details: the message said that fsck must be run manually, without -a or -p. (if I remember well)

[Emmanuel Touzery (emmanuel-touzery)]

searched more, i think the error came from /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh or /etc/init.d/checkfs.sh

so changing the package accordingly. once more, i understand the behaviour is here for a long time, but i think it's unnaceptable for the target group of ubuntu.

[Nicolas Dumoulin (nicolas-dumoulin)]

I think this bug is related to #58430
doesn't it ?

[Martin (martin615)]

> 99.9999% of users of ubuntu, if they find out how to run fsck at that prompt, will say YES
> to every of fsck's suggestions, only a few kernel hackers would know enough to not follow
> the defaults in fsck.

I wonder if even kernel hackers know enough to not follow fscks suggestions... seriously...

> so i suggest that instead of dumping the user to a shell, something like that is displayed:

> "Serious filesystem corruption detected; Press <Enter> for automatic recovery, <F12> for
> manual recovery (expert mode)"

Why not just run "automatic recovery". I don't really see mere mortals doing anything else. It might be interesting for filesystem developers doing some sort of debugging. But if you're a filesystem developer, you can set up your system to not run fsck automatically anyhow.

If a question is to be put on the screen, I suggest making it timeout after a couple of seconds. But I really don't see the point in asking at all.

[Martin (martin615)]

Btw, why is this bug only marked as "wishlist"? It's a major BUG for people who don't know about fsck!!!!

("I can't start my Ubuntu system and have no means of going online to check for the information. Right, going back to Windows.")

[Emmanuel Touzery (emmanuel-touzery)]

Nicolas Dumoulin: I agree, it's a duplicate. I marked it duplicate.