File system mount taking forever.

Hey folks, new guy here :p
Anyway, I'm a Gentoo Linux user, and I happen to have a big (300 GB) vfat filesystem on my fstab; its line looks like this:

/dev/disk/by-label/media /mnt/media vfat noatime,defaults 0 2

Whenever I boot up my machine it pauses for a really long while (a minute or two usually) before finally mounting it and continuing. Is there anything that can be done about this, or is it because of its size? It's been configured this way for around two years but it used to mount much faster.
Thanks in advance!

Large FS size should not really delay mount operation. Did you notice any fsck was running when you booted it? After logging in , Can you umount /mnt/media and mount it again manually to see whether the delay still there? Also check out for "dmesg" for any error/warning messages

Ok, it's probably being fscked when I boot up, because unmounting and remounting doesn't create the delay, and running fsck on the (unmounted) filesystem takes a similar amount of time.
I'm almost ashamed to ask, but how do I stop this from happening? Shouldn't fsck be run only when the system detects something's wrong? I'm thinking of putting a 0 instead of 2 in its last fstab column but then it won't be checked when it does need to be checked, how do I solve this?
Thanks a lot!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by escozzia

I'm almost ashamed to ask, but how do I stop this from happening? Shouldn't fsck be run only when the system detects something's wrong? I'm thinking of putting a 0 instead of 2 in its last fstab column but then it won't be checked when it does need to be checked, how do I solve this?
Thanks a lot!!

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In Linux world we don't need to be ashamed :P even linus don't know everything about his kernel :D .
True,fsck will run when it detects something wrong .. but it will also run based on how FS configured. fsck will can be run based on mount counts and also based specific time intervals.
Check out your current configuration with

Quote:

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tune2fs -l <your_drive>

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Checkout man tune2fs

Quote:

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-c max-mount-counts
Adjust the number of mounts after which the filesystem will be checked by e2fsck(8). [...]
-i interval-between-checks[d|m|w]
Adjust the maximal time between two filesystem checks. [...]

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Mmm yes I thought about tune2fs but it doesn't work for vfat filesystems, does it?
I guess I could always take out the check in fsck and just add a cron job
Again, thanks!

oops,I missed out you were referring to vfat,man page of tune2fs says "ext2/ext3/ext4" . But I think tune2fs should also work with vfat fs,just my guess. :P

Mm, nope it doesn't seem to work for vfat.
I looked it up, and it seems a vfat file system doesn't keep track of how many times it's been mounted, so it's checked every time (this could be wrong though)
I guess I'll just have to put a 0 in that last fstab column and remember to check it about once a month :p
Thanks a bunch for everything!