In message <199808071204.FAA19765@shell17.ba.best.com>, Todd Whitesel writes:
>  - every time I mounted it, I got messages asking me to fsck it.
>  - when I fsck'd it, nothing was wrong, it asked if I wanted to mark it clean
>.
>  - I typed 'y' to mark it clean, it said the filesystem was modifed.
>  - I then umounted and remounted the filesystem.
>  - it still said it was unclean and asked me to fsck it!

Yup.

That's right.

>So I tried fsck'ing it while it was not yet mounted, and that fixed it.

Yup.

I believe if the filesystem was dirty when mounted, unmounting probably resets
the dirty flag, because after all, you can't be sure it's clean, what if
someone wrote to it while fsck was running?

The reason nothing was wrong may be that the disk was fine, but the clean bit
had never gotten set.

-s