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Topic: fsck always fails after a power loss, isn't ext3 supposed to prevent this?

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AwPhuch

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Joined: April 2004

Posted: Jan. 14 2006,01:41

DSL doesnt support EXT3 journalling..however it does support mounting r/w of a reiserfs (3.0, because 4.0 is slightly buggy at this time) partition

A good way to create a "journalling" supported partition is to start DSL, enable apt, get the reiserfs tools, then activate (I guess you would use modprobe reiserfs) then format using (mkfs -t reiserfs /hda/???) then reboot....

Im not 100% sure as I havent done this, but others have given me the "thumbs-up" on using a reiserfs system

Anyone out there of "guru" quality want to whip up a reiserfs.dsl and/or assist in a walkthru/howto?!?

Perhaps I should go ahead and give it a whirl myself...in fact...I shall give it a try tonight on my old laptop

Oh and if booting from a frugal ext2 partition it doesnt matter...as the cdimage stored in the ext2 partition never changes there is no danger of damaging the data there...now your personal data in a perisistant (/home /opt) partition would be in danger...thus the reiserfs method

Brian
AwPhuch

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mikshaw

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Posted: Jan. 14 2006,02:02

Yeah...I have a need to repartition due to this problem. I've been running dsl with home and opt on the same partition as dsl, and i have to fsck the partition at least every couple of weeks to prevent it from screwing up. When i had my persistent directories on a reiserfs partition i didn't have that problem.
So, probably best to have a 50mb ext2 partition just for DSL, and put everything else on reiser.

As far as i've seen DSL does not boot when it is installed to reiserfs, and if it's on ext3 it will be mounted as ext2. No idea why, but that's the way it is.

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schamberlin Offline

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Posted: Jan. 14 2006,04:18

Quote

As far as i've seen [DSL booting] if it's on ext3 it will be mounted as ext2. No idea why, but that's the way it is.

Again, this seems like a bug. Can anybody explain why this is? Or how it could be fixed? Kernel recompile to add ext3 journaling support maybe?

schamberlin Offline

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Posted: Jan. 14 2006,06:16

To answer my own question, it seems that it _is_ as simple as a kernel recompile. I did some sleuthing and learned that the DSL kernel is configured with ext3 support as an external module, instead of being compiled directly into the kernel. I recompiled the kernel with ext3 compiled directly in, and now it works!

Or I think it works, at least. After switching to my new kernel, I can now power off my laptop with impunity, and it always reboots fine the next time without any fsck complaints. I don't see any special ext3 or journaling related messages at startup, but I assume it's working.

Question to the DSL maintainers: why is ext3 support not compiled directly into the DSL kernel by default? Since it's already included as a module, I don't think it would require any extra space to compile it in directly instead. That would solve a lot of problems that me and other people seem to have with ext2, without needing to worry about setting up reiserfs.

cbagger01

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Posted: Jan. 16 2006,05:13

I think it probably has something to do with keeping the kernel size managable, but I dunno.

You can accomplish the same feat by adding the ext3 or reiserfs modules to the minirt24.gz (frugal install) and also edit the linuxrc to load these modules at boot time.

You could also do something like this for a full hd install, but you would need to place these files on a separate EXT2 /boot partition because you get into a Catch-22 situation otherwise. IE: You can't mount the root partition until you have the modules, but then again you can't get the modules until you have mounted the root partition

9 replies since Jan. 12 2006,07:11

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