fsck: broken file system with background check remains broken after bootup

[Oliver Fromme]

Rob <spamrefuse at yahoo.com> wrote:
 > [...]
 > However, the main user of this particular PC is not at all a guru; on 4.10
 > I had rc.conf configured such that at bootup all filesystems would be
 > automatically fixed with: fsck_y_enable="YES".
 > With 4.10, this always worked nicely, whatever sudden power cut have happened.
 > 
 > However, with 5.3, a recent powercut crippled  the /usr filesystem such that
 > X11 hanged. The user of this PC was convinced that FreeBSD was infected by a
 > virus :(.

I would strongly advise you to teach that user to properly
shut down the machine instead of just pressing the power
button, thus eliminating the real cause of the problem.
(If you're suffering from frequent power outages, then a
UPS should be installed.)

By the way, you can map a key combination (Ctrl-Alt-Del or
something else) to the »halt« or »power-down« functions,
using kbdcontrol, so it's very easy and intuitive to shut
down the machine properly.  See the kbdmap(5) manpage for
details.

Apart from that, I suggest you simply disable background
fsck.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

We're sysadmins.  To us, data is a protocol-overhead.