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I have several RaspberryPi's running (~100). After a power breakdown some devices no longer started with the following error message:

enter image description here

It seems that the root-partition is broken. After I have connected the SD-card to the PC I was able to run fsck and within a few seconds everything was fixed and the SD-card booted without any problems.

My question: Is it possible to include fsck or something similar to the partition with the linux kernel? I like to make an automatic fsck at the boot-time to fix filesystem problems (especially problems onthe /-partition). Is this somehow possible or what is the best-practice to solve this problem?

The only alternative I see is to make the system read-only, but for this more effort is required. I hope I can avoid this now (and implement it later when I have more time).

Thank you very much

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  • Have you considered a UPS?
    – Steve Robillard
    Commented Aug 2, 2017 at 6:33
  • This probably would be too expensive for all devices, but otherwise it could be a solution. Unfortunately some of the users also just disconnect the device from the power source and then the filesystem still could break.
    – Kevin Meier
    Commented Aug 2, 2017 at 6:35

2 Answers 2

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After trying out the approach of creating a forcefsck file in /, fsck actually complained with the message:

Please pass 'fsck.mode=force' on the kernel command line rather than creating /forcefsck on the root file system.

So instead of creating this file on every boot, I added fsck.mode=force to /boot/cmdline.txt.

This forces a fsck check on every reboot as well.

The setting fsck.repair=yes which is already in place should ensure that fsck always tries to repair issues, avoiding the need for manual interaction during the process.

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You can place a file named forcefsck in /boot. So you can plug the SD card into any computer that is able to mount the FAT file system and create the file there.

But I don't know in wich stage of booting your panic happens and if you will reach the fsck stage before it. So it might or might not work.

EDIT:

A quick search on the raspberry pi forum suggests that forcesck has to placed be on the root and not the boot partition. /forcefsck instead of /boot/forcefsck. I think the latter will run fsck only on the boot partition.

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  • The "mount error" is shown at the very beginning. So I'm not sure if the "/forcefsck" trick will work, because I think the kernel would require to mount to filesystem to recognize this file? Unfortunately I cannot test this, because if I create the file, I first have to fix the filesystem.
    – Kevin Meier
    Commented Aug 2, 2017 at 8:14
  • Can you confirm that using the /forcefsck method it will automatically fix issues and not halt the process waiting for user input or anything like that?
    – Adam Reis
    Commented Jun 13, 2018 at 7:04

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