On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 15:44, STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT) wrote: > When Linux boots after a power failure or other > hard stop, the boot process detects that the file system > was not closed cleanly and gives you some small number > of seconds to press the 'y' key to check the file system. > If you do not press the 'y' key in that interval, the > potentially corrupted file system is mounted. Why is > this default instead of the other way around? In fact, this behavior can seem confusing... For ext3 filesystems, after a power failure, what the prompt is really asking you is whether to forcefully check the filesystem instead of only replaying the log. However, if the root filesystem is ext2 (instead of ext3), even if you don't answer Yes explicitly, the filesystem will be checked.