Bug 368

Summary:	fsck forced unnecessarily
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	john.wiersba
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5.1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1998-12-09 19:31:01 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description john.wiersba 1998-12-09 19:12:09 UTC

Occasionally, when rebooting after a clean shutdown, I get
the following boot sequence for all my volumes:
 [/sbin/fsck.ext2] fsck.ext2 -a /dev/hdb8
  /dev/hdb8 has reached maximal mount count, check forced
  /dev/hdb8: 31/256000 files (0.0% non-contiguous), ...

Obviously, this is not good (it takes a long time, too).  It
doesn't seem to be related to anything I did while I was
running before shutting down.  What is this "maximal mount
count"?

Comment 1 David Lawrence 1998-12-09 19:31:59 UTC

This is acually a feature of the Linux operating system.  What is
happening is that the system is reaching a mixmal count for the number
of times that a file system has been mounted.  Once that count is
reached, the system performs a filesystem check to verify that
everything is functioning well with the filesystem. Just call is
preventative maintenance.  Anyway, the number of mounts before this
happens is set in the fstab file.  Check out the man page for fstab is
you would like to alter the number of mounts before the system check
is performed.

Comment 2 Aleksey Nogin 1998-12-09 23:28:59 UTC

I believe, the max mount count is set by tune2fs -c, not by /etc/fstab

Comment 3 David Lawrence 1998-12-10 17:25:59 UTC

You are correct. That was our error. You do need to use the tune2fs
command for altering the amount of times between two mounts to run
fsck on the partition. The last two numbers of each line in fstab are
for the dump utility and the order to mount the partitions during boot
up.