[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Three checkfs.sh questions

[Michael]

Hi all,

(I'm not subscribed to the list, but i hope you've got a few minutes to look into it)

Some weird hardware noise drove my attention to the second backup disk, maybe it's gone. Experimentally, i disconnected the power connector and booted again.
However, it turned out that S30checkfs.sh tries to access it anyway, even though it's 'noauto' in fstab. (And barfs about this error, with all whistles and bells)
I'm somewhat surprised about that. 

You may wonder what it's all about. But consider my situation: I just discovered a disk failure, probably due to lifetime. It would be a good idea to avoid powering up such a backup disk at all, until it's really used. It could extent lifetime 10x to 20x, in my case. It seems to get activated by BIOS at power on. Shutting it down with sdparm later, when linux has booted, would not achieve the same effect.
Instead, i could imagine inserting a simple power switch.

I'd like to tell you another issue i'm thinking about since years.
Wouldn't it be preferably to do fsck whenever i don't use this desktop computer ?
I mean, i'm often in a hurry to do the first communications, when i boot the system, and i'm sure there are more like me.
For example, i am using different system shutdown modes, one of which is doing backups first before power off. So i can have full HD speed for my work.
I imagine that fsck could be done at shutdown as well. This would be especially useful on laptops (slow HD) and desktop PCs.
Of course, if an error occured, the system would not stay powered on (and wait for me returning from holidays), but still shutdown and mark another fsck for next boot. Maybe it could leave me a note on the printer :)

In summary, i've three questions:
- Can i preserve the fstab entry, and have checkfs.sh skip this disk at boot, i.e. so that a power switch would work ?
- Do you think it's useful to handle fsck more flexible, maybe allow users to disable it at boot and enable at shutdown ?
- Though it's no sysvinit question, i'd be interested what do you think about increasing disk lifetime by power-off ? I'm no hardware crack, maybe there's a technology superior to recent SATA that can do that by BIOS settings ?
This is a very new system, but probably, it's just a poor BIOS, of course.

Greets,

Micha

 m°