[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#625820: Please let the user know when fsck'ing while booting -> machine looks dead

[Tomas Pospisek]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.88dsf-13.1
Severity: normal

Synopsis:
=========
when the machine does an fsck while booting, there's no way to know. The 
user should be informed of the fact otherwise she has no way to know 
whether the machine is dead or not.

Long version:
=============
Lately, while rebooting, my machine just stayed black. Nothing was 
happening except for the disk drive LED being on.

It needs to be noted, that my laptop has problems waking up from suspend 
and related subjects, so it just could have been that it was trying to 
revive and somehow had died in the process.

Changing the screen with Alt-Fx was not possible, pinging the machine was 
not possible either (I think - I did not test that, lacking a second 
machine) and logging into the machine over the net didn't work.

So the machine was indistinguishible from a brick with a shining led.

Consequently I hard shut down the machine a few times and tried to reboot 
again and again before starting it in rescue mode and seeing that indeed 
it was doing a long fsck of the large root partition.

Wish:
=====
Please provide the user with live feedback, about when a fsck is 
happening and about the progress of it.

I'm not sure initscripts is the correct package to report this bug 
against?...

Thanks,
*t