What does Boot Unix No Sync mean?

© September 2015 Anthony Lawrence

Anonymous asks:

I ran fsck and when it finished I got a message telling me to Boot Unix No Sync - what does that mean?

Although this probably sounds very wrong to you, it means that you have to hit the power switch to shutdown the machine. Do not run shutdown, do not run haltsys. Do not do anything other than power off or restart the machine.

What's happened here is that fsck thinks in-core data will overwrite its fixes. To avoid that, it wants you to cold boot now. Do what it wants - you are not going to make things better by second guessing fsck.

In fact, unless you are intimately familar with file system internals, you should never think you can do better than it does. I've had people tell me that they say "No" to fsck because they don't want to lose data. That's a foolish statement; see Fear of fsck for why.

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