While trying to trouble shoot a strange problem I am having with the Finder, I started up in single user mode (Apple-S during boot) to run fsck (the unix File System Check utility). When I ran it, I was told that I could not run fsck because File System Journaling was enabled. However, I did not enable it. It looks like it is enabled by default in Panther. The shiny new Disk Utility application would not let me disable it. But if you want to force fsck on a Journaled disk, you can use fsck -f.
[robg adds: Journaling is on by default in Panther, but I thought one of the key benefits was that there was no longer a need to run fsck? Can someone in the know clarify for us?]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031026181823991