From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: [Problem] SLS, fdisk, and mke2fs Date: 30 May 1993 19:19:26 GMT
On 28 May 93 14:57:25 GMT, jarreau@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Michael P. Jarreau) said:
> Hi. I am trying to install SLS 1.01 (it is the one on
> sunsite yesterday) and I had problems with fdisk and mke2fs.
> When I check my set up in fdisk I am told the following:
> Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 17 sectors, 936 cylinders
> Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hda1 1 1 610 82959+ 81 Linux/MINIX
> /dev/hda2 611 611 912 41072 81 Linux/MINIX
> /dev/hda3 913 913 936 3264 81 Linux/MINIX
> The problem was related to /dev/hda1 and said something about an odd
> number of sectors. Do you know what this means? Is it an error which
> should be corrected or am I ok leaving things the way they are?
This is nothing to worry about. The first partition starts
immediately after the partition table sector, but ends at a cylinder
boundary; hence it contains an odd number of sectors. The other
partitions fill an entire number of cylinders with no partition table
sectors, so they are occupying an even number of sectors.
Linux filesystems use 1K blocks as their basic unit; if your
filesystem has an odd number of sectors (a sector is 1/2 a block) then
there will be a spare odd sector left over at the end, and this is
indicated by the "+" after the number of blocks. It is not important.
> By the way, each of the partitions were created as primary
> partitions. (Is this correct also?)
Yes, absolutely.
> When I run mke2fs on /dev/hda2 I enter the following command:
> mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 41072
> the program responds with:
> ...
> mke2fs: Unable to find a block for the inode table.
> Can you tell me how to fix either/both of these problems? If they are
> be answered in FAQs somewhere, please send pointers them.
This is a known problem with ext2fs which will hopefully be fixed
soon! In the mean time, try
mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 40960
which will unfortunately waste a little space on the filesystem, but
which should work. Try 40959 blocks if it doesn't. Ext2fs currently
has problems with partitions which are just larger than an exact
multiple of 8MB, due to the way in which it divides filesystems up
into 8MB block groups.
Cheers,
Stephen.