Make fsck run without intervention after non-clean shutdown

Question

I'm using my raspberry pi as a NAS mostly. If on reboot it does a non-clean fsck the pi dumps to a terminal. I don't have it hooked up to a monitor or keyboard so this is a pain for me to actually access it.

Can I set a setting telling it to never go to a terminal and instead just continue booting so I can ssh in and fix the problem?

Answer 1

There's no setting that you can set but you can modify the boot scripts. Rather than allowing it to run fsck with the current options, change the script to execute it like this:

fsck -A -a -y

The first -A indicates check all filesystems. The -a says "Fix it without asking" and the -y similarly will answer "Yes" to any question it wants to ask you.

Of course, exercise extreme caution... While fsck usually works just fine you do run the risk of it making things worse. :)

Answer 2

Set up a serial console? And use that for when it goes wonky?

Answer 3

I just ran in the same issue with the extra problem that the Raspberry Pi is running with a 3G in a remote location.

My conclusion after examining how this can be avoided, I conclude that the one has to modify the startup scripts by modifying the call to 'sulogin'. When 'fsck' returns with error, 'sulogin' gets called without a time out. So I edited '/etc/init.d/checkfs.sh' and '/etc/init.d/checkroot.sh' so that 'sulogin' also gets a '-t' parameter in all cases (I put 'sulogin -t 60 $CONSOLE' where you read 'sulogin $CONSOLE').

I can't see a clean way to put a parameter in '/etc/default/rcS'. You can set 'FCSKFIX=yes' in there, but that will not avoid 'sulogin'. A hack could be to define CONSOLE like this 'CONSOLE="-t 60 "$CONSOLE"' but that could have unwanted sideeffects as CONSOLE is also used in other locations.