Subject: Re: e2fsprogs: Seems to be hanging and then is suddenly finished...

From: Theodore Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 01:30:13 -0500

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 09:40:26PM +0100, Manuel Bilderbeek wrote:
> I don't know whether you can do something with this report, but I'll
> file it anyway.
> 
> Today I had an fsck on my main (ext3) partition. It's a rather large
> partition (500GB), so it takes a while. It progressed slowly (with
> irregular speeds), but at 33.9% it stayed for about 15 minutes after
> having done about 10-15 minutes on the first 33.9%. Then I looked away
> for a few minutes and I saw my login-screen. So it had suddenly
> finished.

At 33.9 percent it would have been checking inodes in the inode table.
Assuming you are using the textual completion bar (as opposeed to some
fancy-shamcy graphical completion bar, which I don't think Debian
supports), there's really nothing that can go wrong.  At one point, I
believe Ubuntu had some scheme where it was getting the completion
information and displaying it on the graphical init screen.  If that
is hanging for some reason, that would be a bug in the fancy graphical
boot up display system, and it's not a bug in e2fsprogs.  You'll need
to figure out what graphical boot up system you are using, and file
your bug against that.

If you are seeing a textual completion bar, i.e, something which
looked like this:

/dev/lambda/backup: |==============                                  - 28.4%   

Then the only explanation I can think of is either a very badly
corrupted file system (but then you would have seen lots of error
messages scrolling buy), or some kind of hardware fault.

In any case, there really isn't anything I can do about this, so I'm
closing the bug report.

Regards,

					- Ted

---

From: Manuel Bilderbeek <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:51:55 +0100

Hi,

 > In any case, there really isn't anything I can do about this, so I'm

I was looking at the textual completion bar and there were no errors 
shown on the screen during the long delay.

I am not experiencing any hardware faults.

However, I understand there's not much you can do...

-- 
Kind regards,

Manuel