Comment 15 for bug 43239

reassign 343645 initscripts
thanks

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 09:52:39PM +0100, mahashakti89 wrote:
>
> I will make it short, I posted on debian-user-french to solve the
> problem mentioned in the subject. It seemed to be a so strange
> error ... I looked to the changelog.Debian.gz in /usr/share/doc and
> also on http://bugs.debian.org to read the bug reports .
>
> The error is following, sometimes , not all the time, at the end of the
> boot process I get following error message : "/sbin/init : Cannot
> execute binary file "
> "Respawning too fast, disabled for five minutes"

If this is happening all the time, and it's fixed by running by
running e2fsck, then you have something causing filesystem corruption
problems. This could be a hardware problem, or perhaps a buggy kernel
or a buggy device driver. It could also be a some kind of
configuration error. Is e2fsck actually giving you some kind of
filesystem corruption problem other than "superblock last mount time
is in the future?"

> I have to reboot, in recovery mode, to umount my / , and to do manually
> #fsck /dev/hdb3 , then I get this error : Superblock last mount time is
> in the future, fix it (Y)
> After this I can boot without any problem.
>
> The date & time on my system is set on Western time . /etc/default/rcS has the following line: UTC=no
>

This error is not an e2fsck bug, but a bug in the initscripts if you
use UTC=no. The problem is that the init scripts run a large portion
of the init scripts, including the initial e2fsck, with the wrong time
set. This is because /etc/localtime is a symlink to
/usr/share/zoneinfox/xxx, and /usr might not be mounted yet.

So if you use UTC=no, the system clock is set incorrectly until much
later in the boot process, thus triggering the e2fsck warning message.
It's harmless, and it's caused by this bug in the init scripts; e2fsck
requires that the time be correctly set when it is run.

What needs to happen with the init scripts is that the localtime
should be set in /etc/localtime.conf, and /etc/localtime should be a
copy of /usr/local/zoneinfo/`cat /etc/localtime.conf`; then the system
clock can be set correctly before e2fsck is run.

You can work around the problem by setting your hardware clock to UTC,
by setting /etc/default/rcS with the line: UTC=yes. The only reason
why this would be problematic is if you dual-boot Windows.

Regards,

      - Ted