fsck problem on updating to F10 -- SOLVED

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 15:07 +1930, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I updated my F9 to F10 from the Preview DVD, but on rebooting after
> updatig I get a complaint about an fsck error and am then offered a
> shell to fix it. Trouble is, I can' t figure out what the error is.
> fsck from the shell shows no errors. Ditto fsck from the DVD in rescue
> mode. /var/log/* has no lines containing 'fsck' .
> 
> I'm doing a yum update right now to see if it goes away, but any hints
> would be welcome.

I figured it out. The problem is with an external USB drive, which takes
a few seconds to come online. The boot process thinks it's failing, but
once I get to the root shell and run fsck, it's fine.

As a workaround I commented the line in fstab and the boot proceeded
normally.

Two observations about all this:

1) The only reason I figured it out was because I'd seen a similar
problem on F9, except that there the boot didn't halt but just proceeded
with an error message. If I hadn't had this background I could have
spent an indeterminate amount of time thrashing about trying to figure
out what was going on. There is simply no excuse for the boot message
not to have told me *at least* which device was (apparently) failing.

2) The boot process (and a lot of other stuff) thinks that a device is
either there or not there. It has no concept of "nearly there if you
wait a little". I mention this because the above mentioned problem with
F9 has existed since F9 came out 6 months ago, and I actually complained
about it at that time. However I may not have filed a BZ report then, so
I'll attend to that now.

3) As long as this absurd bug exists, I'm going to have to remember to
edit my fstab file every time I reboot. Twice.

poc