On Jun 9, Erik E. Fair wrote
> Alas, it apparently did not allow enough time for the disks to flush before
> removing power; fsck had some work to do on the root filesystem after
> reboot, despite the "syncing disks ... done" message.
> 
> I hasten to point out that I have a Quantum Fireball 1080S in this beast,
> and this may be a HDA cache-flush issue; Apple had this problem with these
> disks a few years ago. Is there an explicit SCSI command to force a disk to
> flush its cache to permanent storage?
> 

I've this kind of problem with a certain combination of IDE disk/motherboard
too : the root filesystem is clean, but the clean flag is not set in the
superblock. My guess is that the superblock (which is written last do the disk)
stays in the disk's cache.
This happens each time I reboot, but not when I halt (and always with the root
fs only). I think that when I reboot, a hardware reset is sent to the disk
before the cache has been written to media, thus discarding the cache's
content. 
I'll try didabling the disk's write cache to see if this helps.
But a small delay (1s ?) between the message 'rebooting' or 'halting'
and the action could at last give us a change to see the messages :)

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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