Comment 21 for bug 219382

I would really like to reiterate that skipping fsck is a bad idea if the file system isn't clean. I'm surprised ext3 lets you mount a dirty file system.

The only exception is XFS (fsck.xfs doesn't do anything except exit(0). XFS runs an fsck each time you mount it. If the journal is damaged, it halts on the mount and tells you to run xfs_repair).

If the file system is damaged, really damaged, I know JFS may take four or five minutes, maybe more, to check the whole file system. I guess ext3 has a better recovery method? I'm not familiar enough with it.

If you really want to go ahead with this, I'd suggest you don't exclude JFS. Instead, exclude ext3. In all cases, run fsck if the file system is dirty *unless* is it one of the designated 'safe to mount dirty' file systems (which to my knowledge is only ext3) and the machine happens to have a battery and it's not on AC power.

I'd like to reiterate that even with ext3, I think this is a bad idea. How do other distributions (openSuse, Fedora, etc.) deal with this situation?