Booting takes too long. Why? (/ was not properly dismounted)

[Bill Moran]

Rohit wrote:
> Here is the dmesg. However, I should tell you that this has been the case with 
> all my FreeBSD boxes. I have two PC's running FreeBSD and a Compaq laptop 
> running FreeBSd all have different types of harddrives. 
> 
> The main problem is that everytime I boot I get the message saying / was not 
> dismounted properly and then it goes through and fixes all the drive block 
> errors. (This is the case on all my computers) 

My mistake ... I misread your original post.

> I shutdown using the shutdown -h now command
> or reboot using reboot now

How big is your / partition?  During the halt/reboot sequence, does it give any
errors?  Are all the buffers flushed?

I'm grasping at straws here ... Is there some daemon running that takes too long
to shutdown or doesn't shutdown cleanly, thus preventing the system from flushing
all its buffers and marking the fs clean?

One thing to try: manually stop all processes that you can, then issue "sync" a
few times, then (when disk activity has stopped) issue reboot.  See if / is still
dirty on reboot.

Does fsck succeed during boot?  Possibly boot into single-usr mode and issue
"fsck -y" until the filesystems are all marked clean, then try your standard
method of rebooting and see if the / partition is now clean.

Many guesses here.  Hopefully one of them will be helpful.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com