Re: ext2 resize problem

[Phil Williams]

Hi Andrew,

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 10:46:37AM +1000, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> Obvious question: you didn't have /dev/hda5 mounted while
> copying/resizing?  (I think you'd have known about it if you were...)
No, I used the Parted floppy disks (1.6.2) because I was messing about with my
root filesystem.

> Apart from that, it looks like Parted might be silently failing.
> (It shouldn't!)
> 
> When you resize, does it show a progress meter?  Any funny behaviour?
I've just used my Parted disks to try the following:

        (parted) resize 5 8.398 2000.000

I heard a quick burst of HD activity, but saw no progress meter.  I then tried:

        (parted) resize 5 8.398 4104.382

This time I saw a progress meter something like this:

        adding groups  nn% (time left mm:ss)

I tried this command again:

        (parted) resize 5 8.398 2000.000

And saw something about shrinking...  Finally, I repeated:

        (parted) resize 5 8.398 4104.382

And I think I saw the 'adding groups' meter again.
However, after running lilo and rebooting, 'df -m' still reports:

        Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
        /dev/hda5                 2952      1285      1487  47% /
        /dev/hda1                    8         3         5  35% /boot
        /dev/hda6                16137      7483      7834  49% /home

I should probably point out here that when I start Parted I see the following
line:

        Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is
        119150/16/63.  Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 503.999M.

and when I run Parted from tty1 (as opposed to from an X terminal window) I see
the line:

        invalidate: busy buffer

repeated a lot whenever Parted does something.

Also, I remember seeing a hard drive related message somewhere saying that two
functions returned different values.  At least one of the functions I think was
a BIOS function (intXX) the other was possibly a Linux function (I admit I don't
know what I'm talking about here ;-)

Maybe some of this is relevant?  Are there any sort of diagnosistic commands I
can run that would help you figure out what is going on?

> > I got the following error message from lilo:
> > 
> >     LILO version 22.2, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
> >     Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2001 John Coffman
> >     Released 05-Feb-2002 and compiled at 20:57:26 on Apr 13 2002.
> >     MAX_IMAGES = 27
> > 
> >     Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
> >     Merging with /boot/boot.b
> >     Fatal: open /boot/boot.b: No such file or directory
> > 
> > On my system, /boot/boot.b is a symbolic link to the regular file  
> > boot-menu.b
> 
> Does that file exist?  (Can you open it via /boot/boot.b?)
OK, I was being really stupid here!  I mounted the root filesystem, but not the
boot filesystem, which explains why Lilo couldn't find the file.

Cheers,
Phil.