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Is there a way to find out if a filesystem check is scheduled for the next boot?

Maybe it's similar to a forced check, which gets triggered by the existence of the file /forcefsck?

htorque
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    Besides command-line tools like dumpe2fs and tune2fs, are there any GUI tools for finding this out? It would seem like a good feature for Gnome Disk Utility (palimpsest) but I don't see it there, or in Gparted.... – nealmcb Sep 23 '11 at 17:01

4 Answers4

30

It depends on your filesystem, in addition to /forcefsck .

With ext2, ext3 and ext4 you can use 

dumpe2fs -h /dev/diskname

Where diskname is for example sda1. You can determine name of your disk partition by running command

mount

Example output (only partly):

/dev/xvda1 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,usrquota,errors=remount-ro)

Where xvda1 is name of root disk partition.

For dumpe2fs three interesting items are

Mount count:              9
Maximum mount count:      36
Next check after:         Mon Feb 14 09:31:33 2011

Ubuntu will run fsck if mount count is equal or greater than maximum mount count, or if "next check after" is passed.

htorque
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Olli
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10

Starting in Ubuntu 11.04, this information will be shown in your /etc/motd file, using the tool /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-fsck-at-reboot, which checks ext2/3/4 partitions for both date-based and count-based auto-fsck events. You can run it manually like this:

sudo /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-fsck-at-reboot --force

and it will report any partitions that will be checked on the next reboot.

Kees Cook
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    Also, cat /var/lib/update-notifier/fsck-at-reboot to see the status from the last run without requiring elevated privileges. – ændrük Mar 08 '12 at 16:25
5

There's a utility called showfsck that will tell you how many mounts are left until the next scheduled fsck.

goric
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    showfsck do not show timed fsck's: ext2/ext3/ext4 is checked on every nth mount or after x days since last fsck, whichever comes first. – Olli Feb 13 '11 at 16:15
  • @Olli: good point - I'm primarily a laptop user so I boot very often and forgot about the timed fsck's – goric Feb 13 '11 at 18:52
0

If you have an ext4 partition you can see how many times it has been mounted:

sudo dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1 | grep Mount
Colin Ian King
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