Quoting Sam Smith (debian@net153.net):
Another issue is when a fsck actually does run, systemd doesn't
display the output, the screen just hangs for 20 minutes or so which
to the unknown user, they may reboot the machine and screw stuff up.
Is that just the nature of systemd or is there a fix?
My systems typically have three partitions mounted, and there's no
problem seeing fsck in progress on the non-root ones. Getting the
root partition to fsck at all (on demand) was more of a challenge
because it has to be done from the initramfs stage.
Looking at scripts/functions there, the kernel parameter needed to
force a full check is forcefsck (not fsck.mode=force), but the
parameter to give you a progress spinner seems to be disabled:
# spinner="-C" -- only if on an interactive terminal
spinner=""
I presume I see progress for non-root partitions because
/etc/init.d/checkroot.sh (or whatever systemd derives from it) gets
this right:
spinner="-C"
case "$TERM" in
dumb|network|unknown|"")
spinner="" ;;
esac
Cheers,
David.