Resizing Reiser

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Thursday 12 August 2004 12:09 pm, Brian Kelsay wrote:

> Were you booted to the LiveCD at the time you ran this last night?  You
> were talking in IRC about looking for the file on the CD, but you never
> said you booted to it.  

I was trying to find a way to search the Live CD images for specific tools, 
and versions of those tools.

I did, of course, boot to a live CD - a couple of them in fact - in order to 
do the resize.

The problems with the swap partition, as I said, were the reason for delving 
into the resize, not anything to do with the resize process as far as I know 
(since the swap partition wasn't mounted).

I think I'm being failrly clear about this.  The system was not unstable prior 
to resizing, was essentially non-recoverable after resizing the / partition 
even though the /boot partition was untouched.

I may have done this in the wrong order.  Davud Brain said the correct 
procedure was:

1. delete your partition with fdisk
2. re-create your partition with the new size
3. run resize_reiserfs on the new partition

I did essentially the reverse, I ran resize_reiserfs, then used parted to 
resize the partition.  When I ran reiserfsck it complained about corruption 
requiring the --rebuild-tree option.

At the risk of introducing further issues and confusing you more:

I think there was also a problem with the versions of software on the disc 
compared to the Gentoo 2004.1 install CD I tried to use to recover.  When I 
chroot'ed to the HD after unpacking the stage3 image, I kept getting 
segfaults on things like "ls" and "emerge".

While someone suggested that this was because of continuing corruption on the 
volume, I think it far more likely that there are significant differences 
between a fully updated 2004.2 system and the 2004.1 installer - possibly a 
new gcc or library.  I might have had better luck recovering using a 2004.2 
install disk, but decided to quit messing around.

In any case, I wiped the partition and am starting over, and there have been 
no unusual errors.