I've got my root on a ReiserFS partition. As I found out, normal fsck'ing of it just checks the state of the filesystem, which happens very quickly (barely half a second). However, when booting up, the scan is being logged twice. Between the first and the second scan, there are 5 seconds when the system apparently does nothing to the disk. Here's a log:
Code:
fsck 1.40-WIP (02-Oct-2006)
[/sbin/fsck.reiserfs (1) -- /] fsck.reiserfs -a /dev/hda5 
Filesystem seems mounted read-only. Skipping journal replay.
Checking internal tree..finished
/: Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x305 of format 3.6 with standard journal
Blocks (total/free): 9765504/8222767 by 4096 bytes
Filesystem is clean
(... 5 seconds of nothing ...)
/: Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x305 of format 3.6 with standard journal
Blocks (total/free): 9765504/8222767 by 4096 bytes
Filesystem is clean
I wonder why the fsck takes so long at boot time, why does it do nothing and why does it check the filesystem twice. If there's anyone who has seen this behavior before, I'd like to know what's behind this.
I guess this is not a hardware issue, as the same problems happened to my friend when I installed Debian on his machine, with ReiserFS as the root filesystem and 2.6.16 kernel for the k7 class.
On my machine, this happened under kernels 2.6.15-1-686, 2.6.16-2-686, 2.6.17-1-686, 2.6.17-2-686, and 2.6.18-1-686.

If you're missing my fstab, here it is:
Code:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0

# Debian oddily
/dev/hda5       /               reiserfs notail         0       1
/dev/hda6       /extra          ext3    auto,errors=remount-ro  0       0
/dev/hdc6       /tmp            ext2    rw              0       0
/dev/hdc7       /var            reiserfs auto           0       0

# Kanotix oddily
/dev/hdc1       /mnt/kanotix    reiserfs notail,noauto,user     0       0

# Windows oddily
/dev/hda1       /mnt/winxp      ntfs-fuse       rw,nouser,noauto,uid=0,gid=640,fmask=0117,dmask=0007    0       0
/dev/hda4       /mnt/windata    vfat    rw,user,noauto,noexec,uid=1000,gid=640,umask=0113,dmask=0002,fmask=0113,iocharset=iso8859-2     0 0

# Swapovaci oddily
/dev/hda3       none            swap    sw,noauto       0       0
/dev/hdc5       none            swap    sw              0       0

# Testovaci oddily
/dev/hdc3       /mnt/test       ext2    noauto          0       0

# Vymenna media
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto,iocharset=iso8859-2  0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/sda1       /media/sda1     auto    rw,user,noauto,fmask=0137,iocharset=iso8859-2   0       0
/dev/sdb1       /media/sdb1     auto    rw,user,noauto,fmask=0137,iocharset=iso8859-2   0       0
#+ pokud je problem s vytvoreni partition
/dev/sda        /media/sda      auto    rw,user,noauto,fmask=0137,iocharset=iso8859-2   0       0
/dev/sdb        /media/sdb      auto    rw,user,noauto,fmask=0137,iocharset=iso8859-2   0       0