pass no in fstab file

["Dr. P. Sriram" <sriram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, shashank singh wrote:

> ># <file system> <mount point> <type> <options>               <dump> <pass>
> >
> >/dev/hda1       /             ext2   defaults,errors=remount-ro 0      1
> >/dev/hda2       none          swap   sw                         0      0
> >proc            /proc         proc   defaults                   0      0
> >/dev/hda3       /usr          ext2   defaults		   0      0
> 
>   Some problem with this sample fstab though both my partition / and /usr 
> are like
> 
> >/dev/hdc3       /    ext2   defaults                    1 1
> >/dev/hda3       /usr ext2   defaults	                 1 1
> 
> >read the man page for fstab and mount.

like it says above, read the man page for fstab and mount. the following
is from the fstab man page

       The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8)  pro-
       gram to determine the order in which filesystem checks are
       done at reboot time.  The root filesystem should be speci-
       fied  with  a fs_passno of 1, and other filesystems 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 pre-
       sent or zero, a value of zero is returned  and  fsck  will
       assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked.

so, in the first example above, / file system is checked during the first
pass and the /usr file system is marked as no check (?). this is an
acceptable practice, but in that case, one should mount the /usr file
system as read-only, which is not done here. it is possible to corrupt 
the contents of /usr and carry on without checking it and run into
some difficulties later on. swap and /proc do
not carry permanent information and 0 in the passno field is the thing to
do. going by the man page, the pasno field for /usr is perhaps better at a
value of 1 (or mount it read only and set the passno to 0).

sriram

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