running fsck if box is reset before shutdown

[hypnofonic]

i have a question.. im running mandrake 7.1 and had to reinstall twice because of a couple of lockups.. once the system rebooted it said that i needed to run fsck. should i answer 'y' to everything that it tries to fix? is that something guaranteed to happen if i ever reset the sys w/o shutting down? is there any other less painful ways of dealing with this?

thanks for the help....

[posterboy]

Yes, if you reset the machine, you can be assured that fsck will be invoked on the next boot. Reason: When linux is shut down correctly, a signature is written onto the disk, that the file system is clean. When you hit reset, that signature is not present. This alerts the system that the disk is not trustworthy. Similar thing to the scandisk that runs in 'Doze when you just cut it off. Yes, answer yes to all the things it wants to do. After that, it will mark the drive clean, and you type exit, and the reboot will go normally. NOTE: This does not always work. It is possible to scramble the disk so badly that no recovery can be had by fsck. Do a normal shutdown every time. If the box is locking up, something is terribly wrong.
Ray


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ray@raymondjones.net
HTTP://www.raymondjones.net

[hypnofonic]

yeah, the lockup was in a X session.. but i figured out how to get out of that without having to reset the pc.

anyway, any other painless way to use fsck? last night when i rebooted, as it was going through the whole load process it told me that my /home partition has problems and i have to run fsck manually.. do i need to answer 'y' to 5000+ lines? is there any other way around that? can't i just format that partition again and get rid of that problem?
i specified only two partitions on when i installed mandrake '/' and '/home'. was the whole installation of all the packages and operating system all on / and '/home' is blank?

sorry, im just a tad confused.. i still using my 'windows' mentality on how the file system is laid out, i guess im still used to having C:, and D: etc and applications asking you where you want to install them...

thanks!!