Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series.

Here’s a (rare) quick entry in this series, with few if any caveats.

If your Raspberry Pi is not using a read-only filesystem, I recommend setting the Pi to run a filesystem check on its root filesystem at every boot.

This will (hopefully) help you catch a problem sooner rather than later, and the resulting recovery effort will potentially be easier. The only downside I see is that reboots take a bit longer.

First, find the name of the block device mounted to /. In this example from a Raspberry Pi Zero W, it’s mmcblk0p2; YMMV:

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0     179:0    0 58.3G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0   58G  0 part /

Then, tell the Pi it needs to check that filesystem every time it’s mounted:

sudo tune2fs -c 1 /dev/mmcblk0p2

All done!

To verify that this change was made, you can look at /etc/fstab and verify the root filesytem has a 1 in its sizth column. For example, from the same device as before:

$ cat /etc/fstab
# <output snipped by cdzombak>
PARTUUID=48777bef-02  /               ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=900  0       1