Disable fsck on Ubuntu 16.04 Boot – How to Guide

The setting I am looking for is in /etc/default/rcS, FSCKFIX=yes. This means "automatically repair filesystems with inconsistencies during boot" and causes fsck to run with the -y flag. It was set to no in both of my Ubuntu systems.

Even when set to no, the boot time fsck is still somewhat noninteractive. mountall runs fsck with -a, a synonym for -p, which means "automatically fix any filesystem problems that can be safely fixed without human intervention". Apparently -p drops to interactive mode if there are unsafe fixes to be made. To run fully automatically, you need -y or FSCKFIX=yes.

Here's the relevant bit of code from mountall.c

if (fsck_fix || mnt->fsck_fix) {
  NIH_MUST (nih_str_array_add (&args, NULL, &args_len, "-y"));
} else {
  NIH_MUST (nih_str_array_add (&args, NULL, &args_len, "-a"));
}

To run fsck on your harddrive you need to boot a liveCD and then run the commands with your harddrive partitions as the target.

"There is no /forcefsck file in my root"

-You need to create the file, it is just a blank file so run sudo touch /forcefsck and fsck will check your drive next time your reboot.