[ILUG] maximum mount check forced

[Wesley Darlington]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 11:02:39AM +0000, Dermot Gorman wrote:
> why does my system on boot up give the error of maximal mount reached
> and then force a check of partitions hda3, hda5, hda6 even when theres
> plenty of space, as you can see from df...
> 
> Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda7               253775     62607    178066  26% /
> /dev/hda5               398250     39520    338169  10% /home
> /dev/hda6               101485       214     96031   0% /tmp
> /dev/hda3               809588    672824     95640  88% /usr
> /dev/hda1              2096320   1422016    674304  68% /mnt/hda1     

When you've mounted a filesystem N times without doing a fsck on it,
the boot process decides to fsck the filesystem, just for the hell of
it. N is usually 20, IIRC, and is usually the same for all filesystems.

[ Murphy's law says that this process is initiated when you can least 
  afford the time for it. :-]

A trick I read about once is to set the maximal mount counts on the
bigger partitions to be different, ideally relatively prime (to each other).

Go to single user mode, unmount the relevant filesystems and use
"tune2fs -c" to set the counts. In your case, /dev/hda1 is a prime
candidate for having a separate max mount count than the other 
filesystems. The default, IIRC, is 20. Set the mmc of /dev/hda1 to 21
using tune2fs.

Wesley.

PS. Of course, making them relatively prime is overkill if you don't
    reboot your boxes very often. Just as long as all the big ones are
    unlikely to all want fscked at the same time.