Blinking cursor replaces splash screen when fsck runs at boot

[Rune K. Svendsen]

Binary package hint: usplash

A blinking cursor in the upper left corner replaces the splash screen and it hangs (I can hear there's still activity on my hard drive). At first I thought my installation was broke so I then pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart my computer. Then I can hear the system reading more on my hard drive so I wait a bit and the login screen appears. I login but I get a message saying the home partition is unavailable.

I then restart my computer and boot into recovery mode. While booting into recovery mode I can see fsck starting automatically because "sdb4 (my home partition) has been mounted x times without being checked". I let fsck finish (~15 minutes), reboot my computer and now it boots fine, the login screen appears and I'm able to log in without any problems.

When fsck is running I notice it says that some other partiton has to be checked soon, if I recall correctly it said sbd2 which is my 10GB root partition. And after rebooting ~3 times the problem appears again. But this time I just wait when the blinking cursor appears (a couple of minutes) and it boots fine.

I think I would be able to reproduce the bug if I knew a way to make fsck run at bootup (the same way it doesn when a partition has been mounted some number of times without being checked).

[Rune K. Svendsen (runeks)]

The same thing happened today. With the same symptoms. If I look in the log file checkroot in /var/log/fsck I can see it has checked my root partition (sdb2) (presumably while the blinking cursor was on my screen (~10 minutes)):

Log of fsck -C -a -t ext3 /dev/sdb2
Sun Jan 27 10:58:43 2008

fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
/dev/sdb2: clean, 138082/1836928 files, 832766/3670852 blocks

Sun Jan 27 10:58:43 2008
----------------

[Jonathan Musther (musther-deactivatedaccount)]

To make fsck run at boot time, open a terminal and run:

sudo touch /forcefsck

Then reboot.

You may be interested in:
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutoFsck

[Rune K. Svendsen (runeks)]

Running the command 'sudo touch /forcefsck' reproduces the bug for me.

[Rune K. Svendsen (runeks)]

This has been fixed in Hardy.