Re: filesystem size vs. physical size


Subject: Re: filesystem size vs. physical size
From: Jim Cole (greyleaf@yggdrasill.net)
Date: Mon Oct 11 1999 - 17:41:30 MDT


Aurel Wisse's bits of Mon, 11 Oct 1999 translated to:

> Hardware: iMac Rev. B, 4GB/160MB.
>
> Problem: When booting into YDL, I get at one point:
> swapon /dev/hda8: Invalid Argument [failed]
> Checking root filesystem
> /dev/hda7 filesystem size (according to superblock) is 1064835 blocks
> physical size is 983040.
> .... bla bla bla ... [failed]
>
> This is my partition table (according to pdisk):
The partition table looked reasonable. The only significant difference
between it and what I have is that my partition table has a couple extra
drivers (Apple_Driver43*Macintosh at base 64 and 118). Don't know if
that is meaningful or not. The rest is almost identical, including the
order.

> I reformatted my 4GB hard disk.
> Partition 5 is HFS+ (is this the problem?)
This shouldn't be a problem, at least it wasn't on my machine.

> Partition 6 is HFS (with small system + BootX to boot into YDL)
I just put my kernel and BootX stuff on my first (HFS+) partition
and left a small second partition (HFS) for transferring files.

> Another funny thing:
> When I am booting into partition 5, the sizes of the disks are: hda5:
> 1.8GB, hda6: 189MB (as read from Get Info)
> But ewhen I am booting into partition 6 I get: hda5: 2GB, hda6: 26MB (also
> from Get Info).
Certainly sounds like there is a very inconsistent view of your partition
table.

> Will the problems go away if I reformat hda and make all my partitions HFS?
I set up all of my partitions from the Mac side before starting the install.
This included 1 HFS+ partition for MacOS/boot files and 3 HFS partitions
(transfer, root, and swap). Then I just selected pre-existing partitions
during the install.

> Or is there a way to tweak the superblock such that it coincides with the
> partition table?
If you can get at the root partition from Linux, mke2fs can be run with
the -S option which only writes the superblock and group descriptors. It
shouldn't mess with any of the inode information. However, this is one
of those last ditch type of things with no guarantees about what will
really happen to your data.

Jim



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