I have found a way around my problem of freezing on startup. The startup script is called from /etc/rc.d/functions You simply find the section where the fsck command is called and edit the flags to remove -a and add -y. I understand that my data may end up getting a little frazzled, but hopefully turning off disk caching with hdparm (this is a low performance system anyway) should sort things out. For what it's worth I'm using SSDs and I've found that a journalled file system (ext3/4) struggled a bit more with sudden power outages, but this is all emperical. Many thanks for all your suggestions. -- View this message in context: http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Forced-to-run-fsck-manually-on-unatte... Sent from the arch general mailing list archive at Nabble.com.