Skipping fsck Manually Upon Boot to Speed Up Ubuntu Server Install

Summary

A friend of mine pointed something my way for speeding up the process for installs. So I remember it in the future. I’m notating it.

He found that casper(7) hides the fsch(1) bits so it will check the file system or disks upon boot. This can have it’s use in some scenarios. But, on VMs and installing stuff over IPMI out of band management interfaces - that only have 100/10 mbps cards - it can make the installation process pretty slow. So, this is pretty useful.

I might try to explore this more. Have been thinking about creating customized images and/or automated installers for the OSs I build. Might be good to implement this into those I build for Ubuntu.

Order of Operations

Upon reaching the GRUB menu during the install. Follow the process below to skip the fsck checks when booting to the installer.

Type e on your computer.

Change the following line in the GRUB menu configuration.

linux   /casper/vmlinux fsck.mode=skip ---

Would change the full configuration from this:

setparams `Try or Install Ubuntu Server`

      set gfxpayload=keep
      linux         /casper/vmlinux ---
      initrd          /casper/initrd

To this:

setparams `Try or Install Ubuntu Server`

      set gfxpayload=keep
      linux         /casper/vmlinux fsck.mode=skip ---
      initrd          /casper/initrd

Type Ctrl-x so the configuration saves and closes.

Once this is done. The installation will start and skip the disk check. Making the initialization of the installation a little faster. Just thought I’d share.