-------- Original Message --------

> Instead it repaired automatically in seconds at next boot.

Perhaps this is why it's such a pain to manually fsck root these days.

Of course /boot is needed before fsck can run in this case. I can't say I do it
any more but I used to wrap apt with a script that re-mounted /boot rw. Hardware
used to require that the MBRs boot pointer was within 8G range of the the
beginning of the disk which is possibly why /boot was separate but then OpenBSD
never got a separate /boot and just had a warning which I think still shows
today when setting up disks or maybe just in their FAQ.