On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 12:06 +1200, Bryce Stenberg wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Steve Holdoway [mailto:st...@greengecko.co.nz] > > The last colum in fstab is marked pass. This defines in what order > > partitions are mounted. You must mount /var in the first pass, as > > software needs it there immediately. So change the root and /var pass > > values to 0 and all should be well. > > > > Thanks Steve, I set it to '1' to force it to be checked (as per Hadley's > comment) and it appears to have booted up fine without errors. > > Cheers everyone, > Bryce Stenberg.
Well, that's not quite what Hads said. Filesystems are checked when marked as dirty, and every x mounts ( see tune2fs for for details on how to manipulate this and annoy sysadmins on ext2/3?4 file systems ). The fsck stuff is performed in passes so that ( for example ) dependencies like /var/www can be set up to be mounted after /var. As I suspected, this field also affects the order in which the file systems are mounted even if fsck is not required. By changing the / and /var pass values to be the same, you ensured there was no dependency between the two, and both were mounted at the same time, ensuring the availability of /var when necessary. Steve -- Steve Holdoway <st...@greengecko.co.nz> http://www.greengecko.co.nz MSN: st...@greengecko.co.nz GPG Fingerprint = B337 828D 03E1 4F11 CB90 853C C8AB AF04 EF68 52E0