If you boot the install CD and say "linux rescue" to bring up rescue mode, the rescue mode will mount all of your filesystems without checking if they're dirty or fsck'ing the ones that are! This is extremely dangerous. It caused me to trash my root filesystem recently and I had to reinstall the whole thing from back up. Surely when someone is booting in rescue mode is exactly a time when it is likely that one or more of their filesystems are dirty and hence should not be mounted without being checked!
Some degree of overhaul is already being planned for rescue mode if we can find the time to do so.
I don't think this is an "if we can find the time" bug. This bug makes it trivially easy to trash a filesystem when trying to rescue a machine. I think something needs to be done.
Agreed it is certainly easy to trash a box if you have the equivalent of 'root' access, which is what rescue mode does. The user is notified that the filesystems were mounted so it is not like its a hidden side-effect of running rescue mode. Also you can specify 'rescue nomount' and the automatic mounting will not occur. We are going to try to have an interface to give the user more control over what happens in rescue mode.
Again, I really don't think you're recognizing the magnitude of this problem. Sure, the user is notified that the filesystems are mounted. But he is NOT notified that they weren't checked! And of course he will assume that they were, since *in all other circumstances* filesystems are ALWAYS checked before they are mounted. There is no other component, as far as I know, of Red Hat Linux which will allow a filesystem to be mounted dirty, short of the user typing "mount" by hand, and that's certainly not what's happening here. As for "rescue nomount", it's not documented anywhere on the screens you see when you boot the CD, and if it's not documented there, it might as well not exist. Furthermore, the user probably WANTS the filesystems to be mounted, since how can he fix whatever the problem is if the filesystems aren't mounted? What he WANTS is for the filesystems to be mounted *after being checked*.
Changed so that we verify the filesystem is clean before mounting it. If dirty, give the user the option to mount or not mount based on this information.
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.