Recovery Mode – Is Recovery Mode Supposed to Hang After fsck?

12.04bootrecovery-mode

Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
I wanted to test running fsck on root file system (ext4) on my home PC before I try to fix a real problem on my work server.

I booted into Linux recovery mode, and selected:

fsck – Check all file systems

This produced:

fsck for util-linux 2.20.1    
/dev/sdb5: 276147/151969160 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 2214857/60774919 blocks

then hung with no disk activity lights flashing. I left it for 10 minutes but no change.
Enter or ESC did nothing. Eventally I did Ctrl–C and it booted.

I only have 1 file system in /etc/fstab (other than proc & swap).

Is this supposed to happen? I searched for other posts in AskUbuntu about recovery mode, and from what I can tell, it should continue somehow after doing the fsck(s).

I did find link which seems to have same behavior but in that case the system was unbootable.

I also booted from 12.04.1 Live DVD and selected 'Test Linux' and manually ran
sudo fsck /dev/sdb5
which ran for about the same time (10 seconds) and also didn't find any errors.

My system dual boots Linux & Windows 7 and Windows C: is an SSD.

Best Answer

It definitely is not "supposed" to do that - but it happens.
Workaround: in the recovery menu just select Drop to root shell prompt enter image description here and inside try 

sudo fdisk -l

to get a list of drives and partitions

mount

should give something like

/dev/sdb5 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)

and then with the partition you just found

sudo fsck -f /dev/sdb5
sudo mount /dev/sdb5 / -o remount,rw

fsck -f forces a check, even if there is no indication of a problem on the partition.
Now your root partition is error free and mounted (rw). You would now be able to do anything there with root permissions - so be careful!

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