Re: "Maximal Mount Count"?

["Adam Williams" <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 1,  2:15pm, Mike List wrote:
> Subject: Re: "Maximal Mount Count"?
> u8rupert@lab2.cc.wmich.edu wrote:
> >
> > When booting Linux the other night, I received this message:
> >
> > "/dev/hdb1 has reached maximal mount count, check forced"
> >
> > This continued for each partition of my Linux drive.
> >
> > 'course, fsck took a LONG time to finish - upwards of five
> > minutes.  It found a few non-contiguous areas and fixed them.
> >
> > When the message popped up, I froze.  I don't recall ever
> > seeing this before, and I have no idea what it means.  I haven't
> > seen it since.

This message is normal and healty.  The maximum mount count is a value stored
in the header of the filesystem that says how many times it has been mounted
sinsce it was lasted checked.  The program that does the checking is called
fsck,  and it automatically gets run anytime a file system reaches it's maximum
count.  There are ways to adjust this value but I don't advice doing so.
 Having a periodic check of the fielsystem is a good idea.  This will always
happen if you turn you machinve off without unmounting the filesystems,  but
with a message "Filesystem no cleanly unmounted."  Think of fsck as scandisk on
steroids.