[gentoo-user] How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[gentoo-user] How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[Aaron Nichols]

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Hello Everyone,
I feel like the answer here should be obvious, but either my google skills 
have deteriorated badly, I'm missing the obvious, or I've just run into a 
strange problem (which I doubt). 

I have a Gentoo install with the following filesystem layout (from fstab):

/dev/sda2 /boot ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/sda6 / jfs noatime 1 1
/dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sda5 /var jfs noatime 0 2
/dev/sda7 /home jfs noatime 0 2

Things work fine under normal circumstances, however if the machine is 
powered off uncleanly (power button, power failure, etc) it refuses to boot. 
The problem seems to stem from the fact that the root partition does not get 
checked prior to mounting. I have the following grub stanza which boots the 
system. It includes the "ro" option which is supposed to tell the kernel to 
mount the root partition read-only at first to perform a fsck. 

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.12-r6
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc 
ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/sda6 udev hda=ide-scsi hde=ide-scsi ro
initrd /initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r6

When booting this it basicly starts udev, then tries to mount filesystems 
and says /dev/sda6 is not a valid partition and drops me into busybox. 

The way I'm able to recover this is to boot to the live CD,
fsck.jfs/dev/sda6 and then reboot and the remaining filesystems fsck
fine and the
system boots. However, one thing I notice is that once / is unmounted 
unexpectedly, it cannot be mounted prior to an fsck (get errors from mount). 
This seems like a bit of a chicken & egg situation.

I can't believe this is a unique problem I've stumbled upon - does anyone 
have either an obvious answer to this question or some examples of a working 
gentoo install using jfs as the root partition (please, no responses of 
"yeah, works fine for me" if you can resist).

I'll happily provide more info as desired - but thought I'd start here. 

Aaron

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