… a drive without a partition? The whole drive? with a ext4 file system on it?
Honestly I dont remember how I set it up, it was quite a while ago, is there a command I should be aware of to see this info?
… to me, the command shows that there is no partition on the drive
but it is formatted as ext4
I really don’t know what to make of it - how to process that information. 
Can you access the data?
In that case I’d back it up …
Yep, can access, write to it and use it fine, havent had any issues with it for the year or so ive been using it
… it looks odd - and it certainly isn’t “standard” to have a whole device hold a file system
instead of the device, holding a partition, holding a file system.
That may be the reason for the check taking so long or even eventually failing or just being aborted.
But that is speculation.
it was this:
lsblk -f
[chris@chris ~]$ lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda ext4 1.0 cc1265a1-3a30-4626-8605-ccf1db077266 1.2T 26% /data
...
compare with the other drive (an nvme)
there are several partitions on it, a file system on each one (ext4, ntfs, vfat)
A thought occured, something important to note is that the startup time does varey alot, sometimes its basically instant, other times its like 10 minutes.
So the drive in question I do have a timeshift backup making daily backups to. Im not exactly sure how timeshift works. but is it possible when it hasnt made a backup today it makes one when I turn my pc on, hence the 5 min delay? Again I have no idea how the backups work under the hood
The (error)message is from systemd-fsck
So, no:
nothing to do with timeshift - not at this early stage of boot for sure
You should probably use your backup to restore the data
after you created a partition (and a file system on it) on that drive.
adapt /etc/fstab after this
There is the program tune2fs
With it, you can set, for example, max. nr. of mounts before a file system check is forced.
(it’s a feature of the file system, not of some external service …)
The systemd service will just check the file system (and attempt to repair it) when it is “dirty”.
It is not entirely impossible that is just a misconfiguration. I mean, that somewhere is set a config or a service to check the drive every boot, instead only if there is a problem, or every 20th boot for example. But i am not sure how to check that.
Blockquote
You should probably use your backup to restore the data
after you created a partition (and a file system on it) on that drive.
Ive been using this drive for like a year, I dont have backups that far back.
… you just need a recent one - who wants to restore from an ancient backup 
… create one now, for instance
Sorry, I think I misunderstood, you were saying to repartition (or in this case just partition) the drive, and then restore the data from a backup.
I thought you were saying I should restore my manjaro pc from before I was using the drive, which in retrospect doesnt make much sence.
Ill give this a go tomorrow, and see what happens
… I was just saying/noticing that a file system directly on a device,
instead of on a partition on a device,
is not common practice and something I have never seen.
I know that I accidentally tried to do that - and that I was warned about it by the program I tried to do it with …
after all - you yourself would have to have created the ext4 file system on the device
you’d for sure have gotten a warning at that point
It obviously works anyway - but this uncommon thing might be the reason for this delay.
Honestly I dont remember having any warnings or any issues at all, iirc I just formatted it via cli, and it just worked fine from there
You are correct - I just tested it in a VM
There was no warning - it just created the file system on the device with no partition,
no question asked, no warning, nothing
I remembered that differently.
There shouldn’t be any issue using the whole disk as a file system - that’s quite often how ZFS / BTRFS are used.
Having very frequent fsck’s happen suggests something is going wrong though - and for a hard drive, that’s normally bad news. It’s worth looking at the SMART data to see if the hard drive thinks anything is wrong. Install smartmontools, and then post the output of:
sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda
This will let us see if the hard drive looks to be failing.
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smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.6.16-2-MANJARO] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital AV-GP (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD20EURX-63T0FY0
Serial Number: WD-WCC4M2FH2X7V
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b63f3534
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
Device is: In smartctl database 7.3/5528
ATA Version is: ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Tue Feb 27 22:52:16 2024 GMT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (27120) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 274) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x7035) SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 3
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 175 173 021 Pre-fail Always - 4241
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 050 050 000 Old_age Always - 50679
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 053 053 000 Old_age Always - 34524
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 085 085 000 Old_age Always - 15369
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 179
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 184 184 000 Old_age Always - 50914
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 095 000 Old_age Always - 36
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 001 000 Old_age Always - 1234
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33625 -
# 2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33610 -
# 3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33610 -
# 4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33591 -
# 5 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33564 -
# 6 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33547 -
# 7 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33547 -
# 8 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33547 -
# 9 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33547 -
#10 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33547 -
#11 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33527 -
#12 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33504 -
#13 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33480 -
#14 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33457 -
#15 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33433 -
#16 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33413 -
#17 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33394 -
#18 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33365 -
#19 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33344 -
#20 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33343 -
#21 Short offline Completed without error 00% 33343 -
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
The above only provides legacy SMART information - try 'smartctl -x' for more
Well, the good news is that none of the imminent failure bits have been flagged. The bad news is that drive has a hair under 4 years of uptime on it, which seems quite a lot.
In this case, I think the most likely problem is that for some reason the drive isn’t dismounting correctly. That said, I can’t think why this would be the case, assuming you haven’t been forcing shutdowns by holding the power button or pulling the plug, of course 
That is a strong theory. There was a guide somewhere in the forum for mounting external/additional drives with a system.d mount instead of the fstab. You may try that. Maybe systemd will be more flexible and dismount properly. Which will not trigger a check at next boot.
If the drive is used for data storage and does not contain any system files, running fsck file system check is just a time-sink
I suggest edit /etc/fstab
sudo nano +10:77 /etc/fstab
and change the final number 2 to 0 to disable fsck:
UUID=cc1265a1-3a30-4626-8605-ccf1db077266 /data ext4 defaults 0 0
is it possible when it hasnt made a backup today it makes one when I turn my pc on, hence the 5 min delay?
Data in OP shows fsck causing a 5 minute delay
If you deal with the known issue first then any other delay issue will be easier to spot
ok, ive disabled fsck by changing the 2 to 0. Ill see if that fixes it
Appreciate everyone help, Thank you 
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