Comment 3 for bug 59293

Agreed. On my system, those dosfscks actually take longer than the remaining boot process combined.

> Perhaps it should be run after a certain amount of mounts or a certain number of days.

The problem is that unlike ext2, Reiser3 et al, FAT doesn't store such when-to-check information in its superblock equivalent, not even when the file system has last been mounted. The latter is kept track of somewhere in the Windows registry instead.

In case the FAT partition in question is not the one where Windows is installed, I see no reasonable way to get at this registry information. In case the FAT partition is actually the one containing the registry, it would have to be mounted first, which at the time it is checked during boot, it hasn't. Parsing the registry is not a trivial task and, in my opinion, not worth the hassle anyway.

The only solution I see (short of storing it on another file system) would be to keep the neccessary information in some part of the FAT filesystem which is generally ignored by Windows and its scandisk/defrag tools, so as not to break Windows compatibility.

Perhaps a reserved sector after the boot sector could be used, provided that doesn't need re-creating of the file system. Could anyone with practical FAT experience please evaluate this? I'm willing to write up a spec if enough people are interested in this feature.