Ask Slashdot:A Fscking Problem

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum.

The following is an Ask Slashdot question submitted by Slashdot reader Iuri Wickert

I had installed RedHat 5.0 (mirrored in April, from CheapBytes), and installed all the recent updates in the CD. When the 2 HDs reached the compulsory 'fsck' (after 5 mounts), fsck reports something like: "/dev/hda2/ Deleted inode XXXX has zero dtime. FIXED" (/dev/hda2 is my root partition, and XXXX is a number). I always shutdown or reboot my computer cleanly, as the "clean" file system flag is always clean.

When I updated my RH 4.1 to a RH 5.0 (December's 97), this error occured to me almost every time the computer booted, so I updated initscripts, the kernel (2.0.32->.33->.34), glibc, gcc, util-linux, everything. It got better, but didn't solve it completely. I noticed that the initscripts pack of Dec. RH 5.0 is noticeably buggy (and different from the great RH 4.1). I also noticed that the pre-compiled kernel, and all the kernel I've built with the RamDisk option enabled got problems in the boot, like "crc error" after the loading of the ramdisk, and messing with "mount" (trying to fsck my root partition already mounted RW); now I compiled the kernel without RamDisk, but the original fsck error persisted.

Examining my /var/log/messages file, I found something "strange" (at least I didn't understanded it):

Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Partition check:
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hda: hda1 hda2
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: hdc: [PTBL] [330/32/63] hdc1
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Jun 7 01:06:12 Bauhaus kernel: Adding Swap: 66020k swap-space (priority-1)
Jun 7 01:06:16 Bauhaus init: Switching to runlevel: 6
Jun 7 01:06:17 Bauhaus syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus syslogd 1.3-3: restart.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: Cannot find map file.
Jun 7 01:10:37 Bauhaus kernel: No module symbols loaded.

I suspect that there is something wrong with initscripts (maybe "shutdown" ?), so a proccess remained (unkilled) with a file opened after "shutdown" unmounted root (keeping the "clean" flag clean, but with some inconsistency in the filesystem). Maybe a result of the "strange" killing sequence of lpd, syslogd and klogd (2 times killing ???) ?

My system is a Pentium 120, 32Mb RAM, WD2340ah (hdc)& WD21600 (hda) winchesters, ZipDrive, Hitachi CDROM (hdd), Crystal Soundcard, modem. All the peripheral work fine.

Anyone can help me? Any help is greatly appreciated!