Comment 40 for bug 554079

I have made the following observations:

Although I am unable to cancel the disk checks by pressing 'C', when the plymouth-animation (red white dots) is running, fsck is running in the background doing the disk checks
The progress indicator percentage seems to increase while the disk check is running. When the disk check finishes, the progress indicator does not increase any more, gets stuck at some percentage value and the plymouth-animation stops and shows all dots as red
When the disk check is in progress, I am able to get to a VT by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. This yields a VT with a blinking cursor
When the disk check finishes (plymouth-animation stops) I am unable to get to a VT by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1
Ctrl+Alt+Delete works regardless of whether the disk check is running or has finished

I have a system with a 1TB hard drive, which takes fsck about 30 minutes to check. When it is time for the disk to be checked, I am greeted with the "Your disk needs to be checked"-message at boot up. Pressing 'C' to cancel the check does nothing, and if I restart my computer (before the disk check has had a chance to finish) I am greeted with the same message and the same inability to cancel the check.
However; if I don't reboot my machine I can hear that the disk is being accessed, and the HDD-activity-LED on my computer case is turned on. If I wait the ~30 minutes that it takes for the disk check to finish, I can hear that the disk stops being accessed, and the HDD-LED turns off. When this happens, the progress indicator gets stuck at some percentage value, the plymouth-animation stops, and I cannot get to a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. Ctrl+Alt+Delete functions however, and when I restart my computer after waiting for - what seems to be - the disk check ending, I am not met by the "Your disk needs to be checked"-message and the computer boots normally.

So it seems that fsck indeed is running in the background, but pressing 'C' does not cancel the disk check, and when the disk check finishes the boot isn't resumed and plymouth animation stops.

The same behaviour is observed when I issue the command "sudo touch /forcefsck", but when the disk check (presumably) finishes (the plymouth animation stops), the file 'forcefsck' isn't removed and the disk check is started again on the next boot. If I boot up from an USB stick and remove the 'forcefsck'-file manually, the system boots up normally.

So the bug seems to be two-fold:

1. The disk check(s) cannot be cancelled by pressing 'C'
2. The system does not continue to boot after the disk check(s) finish