Description:

/etc/rc.sysinit runs /sbin/fsck. However, fsck's stderr is piped to /dev/null. I think it would be better to display what fsck said.

Background:

Arch aborted booting and told me that my root file system's superblock was bad. That's a little unsettling, especially because it was the first boot of my very first install of Arch.

I dug through rc.sysinit and found the line that tells fsck to check all of fstab. When I ran it at the prompt, it turned out that fsck just said: "/dev/mapper/foobar: No such file or directory". So the simple problem was fstab containing a wrong device file name. But simple problem + suppressing stderr + bogus superblock message = user close to abandoning Arch and sticking with Ubuntu.

Package:

initscripts-2009.08-1 (when you install Arch today, this is what you get)