From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: * partition question * Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 20:32:11 GMT
> Hi netters,
> As a second attempt since last november, I tried to install Linux yesterday
> with no success...
> Anyways, i reboot the computer, and do
> the mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 82032 (80 megs)
> can linux handle that big of a partition??
Yes, no problem.
> but both times I got a message after mke2fs
> saying that "it couldn't find a block for the innode table"
> or something similiar....
> And the file system was not written on partition #2
This sounds like a problem with an older version of mke2fs; if the
partition was almost exactly a multiple of 8MB long it could get
confused. E2fs splits a partition into 8MB groups, and with a
partition just a few blocks larger than an exact multple of this, it
would try to make too many groups and would run out of space for the
last one.
The best solution would be to use mke2fs from the e2fsprogs-0.3 from
tsx-11.mit.edu or ftp.ibp.fr in /pub/linux/BETA/ext2fs. Of course,
until you get SLS installed, you can't compile these, you would need
to rely on somebody else to do this for you.
Alternatively, you could try trimming down the size of the partition
by a few blocks; try
mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 82000
and see whether that works. You won't be able to use the last 32K of
your partition, but it should work (you might want to experiment a
little to find the largest number of blocks which does work).
Of course, you could always install just enough of SLS to recompile
the e2fsprogs-0.3, and then start again with the new mke2fs, but this
may not be worth the effort for a few K of filesystem space.
Cheers,
Stephen Tweedie.