Re: Parted, fixed size partitions, copying and resizing

[Andrew Clausen]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2004 at 11:33:40PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> I ran across an interesting problem today.

:(

> So, is it actually possible (for me) to standardize on a partition
> size, and have parted create partitions of exactly that size, no matter
> what the "geometry" of the drive?  If not, why not?

No.  It was just never added to the user interface.  I'm accepting
patches if it fits in nicely with the UI.

> Second problem I caused was by trying to resize a backup partition
> that was installed on my main server, as the current backup partition
> (to this common size of 250,000,000,000 bytes).  This was a slight
> shrink of the partition.  I unmounted it before trying to resize, but
> didn't remove the ext3 filesystem journal.

This isn't necessary.

> This, or something else,
> caused parted-1.4.24 to corrupt the filesystem while resizing it.  The
> current filesystem contains inodes and pointers outside the partition.
> fsck can't clean up the partition.  I'm afraid to run parted "resize"
> again on it.  debugfs won't open it.  The kernel is happy to mount it
> read-only, and I can get the data out of it (I don't know what data is
> good v. bad, but most of the partition was free space).

Ouch!  That's really weird.  What does parted's "check" command say?
I wonder if it is a cache-coherency problem or a real resize bug.
I don't have any theories.

Is there any evidence Parted changed anything on disk other than the
partition table?

Cheers,
Andrew