While booting with kernel 2.4.20-2.21 one of my disks needed fsck since it was mounted 20 times already. The checking went for 1/2 hour for only 40%. I rebooted and tried again, same story. I rebooted with 2.18, the check was completed in a minute.
What sort of disk and controller?
02:08.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892A U160/m (rev 02) scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 <Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI adapter> aic7892: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs blk: queue c467a614, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) Vendor: SEAGATE Model: ST318451LW Rev: 0003 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 blk: queue c467aa14, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) Vendor: SEAGATE Model: ST318451LW Rev: 0003 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 blk: queue c467ae14, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) scsi0:A:0:0: Tagged Queuing enabled. Depth 253 scsi0:A:1:0: Tagged Queuing enabled. Depth 253 Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0 (scsi0:A:0): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit) SCSI device sda: 35566478 512-byte hdwr sectors (18210 MB) Partition check: sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 < sda5 sda6 sda7 > (scsi0:A:1): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit) SCSI device sdb: 35566478 512-byte hdwr sectors (18210 MB) sdb: sdb1