Re: Problems mounting an ext3 filesystem with XFS kernel

[Seth Mos <knuffie@xs4all.nl>]

At 10:22 28-1-2003 +1100, Lucas Barbuto wrote:
>Hi Seth and Harri,
>
>Yep.  Both exactly the same.  I didn't create a seperate /boot though.
>Could this be a problem?  I've never had to do it on any machine I've
>installed before.  I'm going to try it, see if it helps (?).

That won't matter.

>Yes.  It's /dev/md1.

not /dev/md0 ??

> > When installing lilo it should print out 2 lines where it installs itself
> > on both disks in the superblock.
>
>Yes, that's right, it gives me a warning about using 0x80 for the disk

That means that linux detects the disk in a different way then your bios 
does. You can correct this with a line in your lilo.conf.

It might be related to your booting problem. If you say that the boot drive 
is hda, which would correspond with what the bios thinks. However when the 
kernel boots the first disk is detected as hde and it can get confused at 
this point.

My lilo.conf contains.
boot=/dev/hde
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
linear
default=2418-rht-1.2
vga=0x430
message=/boot/message

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-19-xfs-1.2pre5
         label=2418-rht-1.2
         read-only
         root=/dev/hde1

This machine has the onboard IDE deactivated as well as your system and 
thus hda does not exist so I changed the boot line.

Subsequent lilo does not give me a line saying it's confused about where 
the disk should be.

>(I don't really get this, but I assume it's not a problem) then it says
>it's successfully installed in /dev/md1, /dev/hde and /dev/hdg.

<snip>

>Harri Haataja wrote:
> > little long shot here, but did you make a new initrd at what points?
> > I'm not sure but I think the actual root filesystem type is mentioned
> > somewhere on the initrd and you have to make a new one if it's
> > changed.
>
>I don't really know much about initrd (my understanding is that it's a
>minimal kernel image that's loaded onto a ram disk for booting the
>system so that you can have essential things like file system support
>compiled as modules).  I'm pretty sure I'm not using it though.  I
>rebuilt my new kernel using Debian's kernel-package tool (make-kpkg).

You could check either the kernel config or a initrd image file in your 
/boot/ If that's where debian places the kernels.

You can always make one, it doesn't hurt either way.

mkinitrd 2.4.18-xfs /boot/initrd-2.4.18-xfs.img

IIRC, don't forget to enter a initrd line in your lilo.conf as well!

>   I
>don't think it uses initrd.  In any case, the root file system shouldn't
>have changed, my original install was onto ext2 and the new system is
>supposed to have an ext3 root partition, should be the same for all
>intents and purposes, correct?  Feel free to correct me here.  Do I need
>to use initrd?  I didn't use one for the last system I installed a
>Boot+Root+Software-RAID on.  Thanks again.

You can always check though. I forgot to compile in the md drivers once and 
put a box 150Km (~100Miles) away out of service.

If you are making a ext3 filesystem on the drive don't forget to make the 
journal after formatting is as ext2.

If I understand what you are trying to do you want to format the / 
partition with ext3 and leave the rest XFS?
If that is so format /dev/md1 with ext2
mkfs.ext2 /dev/md1
Create the ext3 journal ontop of it.
tune2fs -j /dev/md1
Now you should be able to mount the / as ext3.

Cheers

--
Seth
It might just be your lucky day, if you only knew.