How to disable fsck on reboot

In Linux, when a filesystem is mounted for certain times, or its last fsck was more than certain days ago, system will perform fsck on it when server reboot. The fsck process can take a few minutes to hours to finish, depending on the filesystem size.

If we want fast reboot, we can disable the fsck check, although it's not recommended to do so.
To disable fsck, there are a few ways.

1. update /etc/fstab
in /etc/fstab, the last column is used by fsck to determine the order of performing file system check at reboot time. For root file system /, it should be 1, for other file systems, it should be 2. If we want to disable the fsck check for certain file system, we can specify 0 in the last column.

$ grep nofsck /etc/fstab
/dev/sda2        /mnt/nofsck        ext4        defaults        0  0

2. use tune2fs to change the filesystem parameters
To list the current settings:

$ tune2fs /dev/sda2 | egrep -i 'mount count|check'
Mount count:                        1
Maximum mount count:        21
Last checked:                     Sat Mar 24 16:15:33 2012
Check interval:                    15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:                 Thu Sep 20 16:15:33 2012

the output is self-explained, for my system, /dev/sda2 will be checked after it's mounted for 21 times, or after Sep 20 16:15:33 2012.

To disable fsck check on /dev/sda2

$ tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/sda2
tune2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Setting maximal mount count to -1
Setting interval between checks to 0 seconds.

check it again:

$ tune2fs /dev/sda2 | egrep -i 'mount count|check'
Mount count:                        1
Maximum mount count:        -1
Last checked:                     Sat Mar 24 16:15:33 2012
Check interval:                    0 (<none>)

3. Tell system to skip fsck when rebooting.

$ /sbin/shutdown -rf now

the -f flags tells system to skip fsck for all filesystems during the reboot. Unlike the fstab and tune2fs methods, it only takes effect during current reboot, will not disable fsck permanently.