Sneaky hfs_fsck post reboot | Comments (1)
Posted in Snippets on 10th July 2007, 1:06 pm by Stuart
Just thought I’d mention this, unlike linux and windows if your mac crashes you aren’t told that the filesystem integrity needs to be checked when you reboot. Now this is probably a good thing up to a point as macs do a good job of hiding technical stuff from people that won’t gain anything from knowing that it’s going on. However, the other day I noticed my machine was really slow after a reboot and when I ran top from terminal to see what was going on, hfs_fsck was running chewing up a fair chunk of CPU. It would be nice if there was a way to have a message exposed when the file system needs checking, rather than do it’s own thing in the background.
This is actually a very bad feature of OS X. Filesystems should be checked before the system boots – regardless of how clever your journaling is.
For example, my /Users area is in a separate partition on my home Mac. If it crashes and restarts, it can let me log in _before_ /Users/norm is available, so I get a default profile. Scared the crap out of me first time it happened, before I realised what was going on.