>On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
>> The last thing before setting tty flags is the fsck of disks.  If the
>> machine prints fscking sd3a before sd2d then the machine always hangs.  If
>> the machine prints fscking sd2d before sd3a then the machine always goes on
>> to complete a normal boot [...]
>> [...]
>> /dev/sd0a       /               ffs     rw 1 1
>> /dev/sd1b       none            swap    sw 0 0
>> /dev/sd2d       /users          ffs     rw 1 2
>> /dev/sd3a       /mirror         ffs     rw 1 0
>> /dev/sd3b       /usr/vice       ffs     rw 0 0
>
>eeeeeeeeeeeK!
>
>that last column tells fsck the _order_ to fsck things in.  to tell you
>the truth, i'm not even sure what a `0' in that column does, but i can
>assure you that the root fs should be `1', and all others should have a
>value N > 1 in them.
>
>you should not modify rc files to sequence the fsck's.

A value of 0 tells fsck not to check the partition. It was my understanding
upon reading the fstab man page that only values of 1 and 2 would be
fsck'd. Man fstab tells you to use 1 for root, so that it's done first, &
to use (exactly) 2 for the rest, & fsck would determine when to do them,
according to whether they're on the same disk or not (i.e. separate
partitions are done sequentially, separate disks are done in parallel). So
whiule it's called the order for fsck, it really doesn't determine the
order other than to do root first.

I'm in no way an expert in these matters & would gladly take correction on
this, but if I'm wrong, then the man pages are worded extremely badly
(relevant man page below).

Mike


The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to determine
     the order in which filesystem checks are done at reboot time.  The root
     filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1, and other filesys-
     tems should have a fs_passno of 2.  Filesystems within a drive will be
     checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will be checked
     at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the hardware.  If
     the sixth field is not present or zero, a value of zero is returned and
     fsck will assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked.

Bikers don't *DO* taglines.