live boot causes maximal mount count to be reached sooner

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

boot from liveCD/liveDVD/liveUSB a few times and the maximal mount count of the permanent hard drive file system(s) are reached really quickly, which causes fsck on next boot of the permanent installed OS.

conjecture: the filesystems get mounted and unmounted several times on each boot, as the live scripts try to find persistent snapshots for home and root, possibly also mount/umount while trying to find persistent filesystems for home and root. in which case this is not puredyne specific...

[Aymeric Mansoux (aymeric)]

to check again with a more recent live-initramfs.

[Sergey Prokhorenko (queen3-tut)]

I experience similar problem with 10.10 release (and with release candidate, too). My existing ext4 partition is recognized, but when I try to open it (from places or in Nautilus) it just disappears (from both Places and Nautilus). It comes back there after I umount it.

Here's what I see in syslog/messages/kernel:
Oct 10 13:54:05 ubuntu kernel: [ 1629.519655] EXT4-fs (sda2): warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended

uname -a:
Linux ubuntu 2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Sun Sep 19 20:34:50 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

I boot 10.10 release from USB flash created with usb creator.

When I boot back to 10.04 installed on the PC, the same partition works OK.

I'm just not sure if it's safe to install 10.10.

[Aymeric Mansoux (aymeric)]

This is perfectly safe and nothing to worry about, just annoying.

Each volume needs to be checked for errors every x mountings, but with live scripts (live-initramfs for Puredyne, and casper for Ubuntu 10.10), when the system boots it looks if there are any persistent volumes or files to load the customized user settings. This can be done up to four times for each volume, meaning that always booting on a live system will make have your disks checks up to four time more than usual.

The only workaround is to pass as boot argument where the persistent file/volume is or remove the persistent boot argument for no checks at all (in which case you won't have your settings saved in between reboots).