how does a system come up if you disable background fsck ?

[Ensel Sharon]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Micah wrote:

> Ensel Sharon wrote:
> > I have disabled background fsck in my /etc/rc.conf with:
> > 
> > background_fsck="no"
> > 
> > But I am curious - what does this mean for the system if the system
> > crashes ?
> > 
> > Does this mean that the system will wait for all non root partitions to
> > fully fsck before coming up into multi-user mode ?
> > 
> > OR
> > 
> > Does it mean the system will boot up quickly into multi-user mode, but the
> > non-root partitions will just not be mounted and/or usable until I fsck
> > them by hand ?
> > 
> > thanks.
> 
> The former, as I can say with ample experience this morning. (stupid USB 
> panic)


That's kind of what I thought, but as I said, I just tested it, and what
happened was:

- system takes 20 mins or so to boot
- partition that lives on system that takes 2 hours to fsck is mounted
- I unmount it and fsck it by hand, and it is indeed dirty
- meanwhile, a lot of /var logs and dmesg.boot are zero/missing

So it looks like it fsck'd / and /var, and just mounted the big partition
dirty.  Is this expected ?