[ubuntu-uk] Fsck forced on boot up due to date problems after update

[Stephen Drake]

On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 10:42 +0100, Michael Holloway wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 09:11 +0100, David Restall - System Administrator
> wrote:
> > Hi Rob,
> > 
> > > I've been trying to install Ubuntu 7.04 on my dad's Thinkpad R50e 
> > > notebook this evening with not much luck.
> > 
> > Snip...
> > 
> > > I then rebooted again, and during the reboot the machine complained 
> > > about not having a disk check for about 49,710 days.  It ran through the 
> > > disk check and rebooted, it then on the second reboot said exactly the 
> > > same thing.
> > 
> > It isn't the battery - I don't know what it is but it's much nastier
> > than a dead battery :-(
> > 
> > Doing some simple maths :-
> > 
> > 2 ^ 32 = 4294967296
> > MAXINT = 4294967296 - 1 = 4294967295
> > 4294967295 / 86400 = 49710.2696181
> > 
> > this is unlikely to be a battery problem.  It looks as if some routine
> > is not reading the date correctly and it is returning either 0 or MAXINT.
> > For those that haven't clicked, 4294967295 is biggest number that can be
> > represented in a 32 bit word and 86400 is the number of seconds in a day.
> > Standard UTC uses the same 32 bits, that's why we have to worry about 2038
> > (1970 + 49000 days).
> > 
> > Quite what the actual problem is, I don't know but I wouldn't be looking
> > at changing batteries, I'd suspect some hardware incompatibility.
> > 
> > Some numbers just ring funny :-)
> > 
> > TTFN
> 
> 
> Hi
> 
> Honestly I've installed Ubuntu countless times, mostly servers. Since
> 7.04 i seem to get this every time! On different machines and VMs. I
> assumed this was just a "lazy" way of forcing a disk check after its
> been installed. 
> 
> So all i do is install, apt-get upgrade, reboot, reboot... and then all
> is fine after that... almost like a post install intentional mess that
> sorts itself out.
> 
> Later,
> Michael
> 
> 
> 

Yeah, I get this all the time too.

There's at least two bug reports already open on this issue.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/96471
and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/107793

Steve