How to boot DSN-323 with Alt-F without fsck

[Mark]

I have installed this new  Alt-F to DNS-323. It works perfectly  but there is an issue with booting up.

The fsck runs every time and system won't mount disks before it's finished. And it takes hours. 

So usually I just kill the fcsk but sda2 and sdb2 are mounted as "read only" disks.

#mount

/dev/sdb2 on /mnt/sdb2 type ext2 (ro,relatime,errors=continue)
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/sda2 type ext2 (ro,relatime,errors=continue)

I need to run remount command to have wright access.

#mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 

I also tried  to stpo fsck from running with   #tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/sda2  command, but it still runs the fsck after on every boot.

How can I boot-up  with disks mounted with rw without entering any extra commands?

[TJ]

Your problem might lie with using an ext2 file system. Migrating to ext3 or 4 will probably solve this.

 

-T.J.  

[Brandon Hume]

On 09/11/13 10:18 PM, Mark wrote:
> I have installed this new Alt-F to DNS-323. It works perfectly but
> there is an issue with booting up.
> The fsck runs every time and system won't mount disks before it's
> finished. And it takes hours.
> So usually I just kill the fcsk but sda2 and sdb2 are mounted as "read
> only" disks.

How are you shutting down the 323? Are you just pulling the power, or
are you doing a"proper" shutdown?

What happens if you let the fsck complete? Does it do it again on the
next boot? (Assuming, again, that you're shutting down properly...)

[Mark]

Okay..I need to investigate how to do that. I'm not an expert with linux

[Mark]

Last time there were a power outage. Usually I never shut it down, but if I need to restart I just do it from command prompt 

When I first time installed the Alf-F I had to run the fsck once before I got any disks mounted. But  before initial fsck, I couldn't kill the process to continue. The fsck needs to bu run at least once with OK status.  After that I can at least kill the process and remount disks to get all mount to work.

But with original FW there were no extra commands I needed to put in to get the system running.

The reason why I changed the fw in the first place was the samba kept crashing. No one could solve the issue so I changed the fw to ALT-F alltogether. But no I have this probem.

Well it's not really even a problem more an annoying issue

If I let the system to run fsck...all will be OK. But it took me whole night, In the morning the fsck was still running.

So basically I'm not going to wait until it's done

[Brandon Hume]

On 12/09/2013 7:59 PM, Mark wrote:
>
> If I let the system to run fsck...all will be OK. But it took me whole
> night, In the morning the fsck was still running.
> So basically I'm not going to wait until it's done

So, fsck thinks your filesystem is damaged. It's trying to fix the
damage. But you keep killing it before it can finish, so the filesystem
never gets marked "clean", and then you keep *using* the unclean
filesystem, potentially worsening the damage and increasing the time
necessary for the *next* fsck attempt. Because you're impatient. At
least, that's my interpretation of the situation.

I really, really hope you have that data backed up on another device.
Especially if you're going to try converting that filesystem to ext3 or
ext4. On the plus side, if you take all the data off the device and
convert, you'll be in much better shape. But taking all the data off and
letting fsck run would quite possibly accomplish the same thing. :)

[João Cardoso]

On Friday, September 13, 2013 2:53:06 AM UTC+1, Brandon Hume wrote:

On 12/09/2013 7:59 PM, Mark wrote:
>
> If I let the system to run fsck...all will be OK. But it took me whole
> night, In the morning the fsck was still running.
> So basically I'm not going to wait until it's done

So, fsck thinks your filesystem is damaged.  It's trying to fix the
damage.  But you keep killing it before it can finish, so the filesystem
never gets marked "clean", and then you keep *using* the unclean
filesystem, potentially worsening the damage and increasing the time
necessary for the *next* fsck attempt.  Because you're impatient.  At
least, that's my interpretation of the situation.

Absolutely.

It is not possible to  disable the fsck "thing" under Alt-F, and it will never be.

Alt-F was motivated at the first place by the lack of a clean shutdown and missing fsck at boot in the vendor's firmware!

I believe this to be a marketing option, as I don't believe that any soft. engineer would do that voluntary.

At the time ext2 was the filesystem at use and as it took so long to do a fsck, it would be bad publicity for the product if the user had to wait hours to get its data back after a power outage.

But even MSW has a similar fsck at boot time once and then, and those old enough to use win98 certainly remember their attempts to do a clean shutdown displaying the "Don't power off you computer" message at power-down time.

With ext3/ext4, the fsck is much faster after a power outage, although a full fsck should be done at regular intervals.

That's why Alt-F displays the number of days/mounts time remaining until the next full fsck, and so the user can take the needed measures.

So, the recommended procedure for all those having ext2, is to convert it to ext3 or ext4, although a slight loss in throughput is expected. No free-lunch!

Under Disk->Filesystem->New FS Operations, select the desired filesystem under "New FS" and then select "Convert" under operations. A full fsck will be performed and then the filesystem will be converted without data loss. If the fsck step fails, it has to be fixed first (Disk->Filesystem->FS Operations)

It is not possible to convert to ext3/ext4 without running fsck first, not even from the command line!

Instead of converting the fs, you could instead reformat the drives using the Disk Wizard and recover the data from the backup. The time it takes will depends on the amount of data you have.

> So basically I'm not going to wait until it's done

I couldn't avoid laughing :-)

Really, really, be sure you know what you are doing when using the command line; if you know how to kill a process from the command line, you should also know what that process is doing and why! Alt-F webUI exists for some reason.

[Peter Pan]

I ran into the same problem. After some googling i found this solution http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Dateisystemcheck.

For those who cant speak german

1. Use tune2fs -l /dev/sdX | grep -i "mount count" to get information whats the actual mount count is and what the maximum mount count is,

If mount count is more or equal maximum mount count then check is forced.

2. Simple edit the mount count to 1 and no check will be done

tune2fs -C 1 /dev/sdX

You have to change sdX to whatever your hd is!