I get a “serious errors while checking the disk drives for /boot” error while booting

Question

I have just set up my new system by creating three partitions on a whole hard disk (/boot, /home, swap and /). I saw this article and now I am getting those errors and the system provide me with some options: (I to ignore, S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery).

I am forced to choose skip mounting because I don't know what manual recovery is. Despite the error I get I think that the system boots okay because I can use the system but this error is very annoying.

Answer 1

The message says some errors were found on the filesystem which fsck is afraid to fix automatically, so you need to do it manually. To do this, press M when it prompts you - this will drop you into a emergency root console. From there you'll be able to run

fsck /dev/sda1

where /dev/sda1 is the name of your /boot partition. You can see the list of partitions by doing fdisk -l.

Alternatively, you can try fsck -A to check all partitions but I suppose it'll only work if the root partition is already mounted so fsck can access /etc/fstab.

It'll probably ask you a few questions - I usually just agree with what it proposes. Also, there's 'a' option which will fix things automatically but the man file suggests to use it with caution. So, ultimately, fsck -Aa should fix all errors on all partitions without asking any questions.

After you're finished, exit the shell with Ctrl-D and the machine will reboot.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem except I had created a RAID volume formatted with XFS. Every time the OS booted I would get the Serious errors were found... message. If I hit i to ignore, the volume would still mount fine.

All I had to do was install the xfsprogs package and run xfs_check. The OS was probably trying to check the filesystem but failed because the utility wasn't there.

Thanks for steering me in the right direction Sergey!