fsck on boot...revisited

[Tim Nelson <tnelson@rockbochs.com>]

I have an interesting use case where a Debian Lenny server runs headless, and is at the mercy of poor power conditions (environmental monitoring at a remote storage building). We used to have issues with the server not coming up after several reboots, but we gave it a bandaid by forcing an fsck on every boot (tune2fs...) to correct any issues. This is fine, and has done wonders for disk errors.

However...

On occasion, we find that a filesystem error is bad enough that instead of auto{matically|magically} fixing the issue and continuing to boot, the system hangs, needing a root password entered for a manual fsck to be run.

My question is thus: How do I prevent that requirement to login and run fsck manually? Is there some parameter that can be set? Or, am I going about this the completely wrong way?

Thoughts? Thanks!

--Tim