Parted cannot understand all ext3 partitions

[Jan Schmidt]

Manually editing the partition size failed to change the size chosen by
auto-partitioning. This seemed to be when I left the cursor in the middle of the
edit box for partition size rather than moving it back to the end, but I'll
check again tonight

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

I can verify this (or an extremely similar bug). I edit the size, but the change
never happens; I come back to the partition list, and the partition is the same
size as before my attempted edit.

Additionally, I have found no way to not get this effect; it does not matter
where on the line I put the cursor, or how I format the request - these all give
the same result: "45Gb", "45 Gb", " 45 GB", "45.0 Gb", "45.0 GB" (and a few more
I've forgotten by now).

Poosibly related is that the partition (which is about 55GB in size) is
identified as an ext3 partition, but the partitioner claims that the smallest
possible size is 512 bytes, even though the disk is about 45% full. The largest
possible size corresponds to the current sie, of course.

The same disk image when run in qemu does not exhibit either the resize problem
nor the confused size estimation.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I encountered a similar problem, and discovered (when running parted on the
command line) that when a check or resize command is executed on some
filesystems, parted will say:

"This ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout" and refuse to act on it.

This is reflected in the UI as simply ignoring the change

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

Created an attachment (id=164)
my "messages" log file

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

Created an attachment (id=165)
My "partman" logfile

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

Created an attachment (id=166)
my "syslog" logfile

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

Looking at the syslog logfile (this is from the 200400921 snapshot), all ide
module loading operations include loading the ide-floppy module, which of course
fails fatally as there is no floppy on this mchine. This is normal - I get the
same error on FC2, without ill effects.

  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Missing module 'ide-mod'.
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Missing module 'ide-probe-mod'.
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Missing module 'ide-detect'.
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Missing module 'ide-floppy'.
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Loading modules...
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Detected module 'floppy' for
'Linux Floppy'
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Trying to load module 'floppy'
  Sep 22 13:39:13 (none) syslog.info klogd: inserting floppy driver for
2.6.8.1-2-386
  Sep 22 13:39:16 (none) syslog.warn klogd: floppy0: no floppy controllers found
  Sep 22 13:39:16 (none) user.notice hw-detect: Error loading 'floppy'

In messages, I get the following on each attempt to resize:

  No matching physical volumes found
  No volume groups found
  Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

What happens if you switch to tty2, run parted on your disk (/dev/discs/...) and
use the "check" command on the partitions to be resized?

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

I have three partitions:

1: ~106Mb ext3 partition
2: ~57Gb ext3 partition (the one I want to resize)
3: ~1Gb swap

I run:

"parted /dev/discs/disc0/disc"

then

"check 1" gives "This ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout! Parted can't
resize this (yet)"

"check 2" - the one I want to resize - gives "Error: Filesystem has incompatible
features enabled"

"check 3" scans for bad blocks

I'm happy to do more testing to help out on this.

[Jan Moren (jan-moren)]

Follow up:

Did a little digging (let my Google do the walking), and came up with the following:

This thread (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-July/msg05147.html)
suggests a way to get rid of the "incompatible features" message - basically,
you need to remove "dir_index", whatever that is.

However, this bug (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=90894)
seems to indicate that partitions created with FC2 are not resizeable or
moveable by parted in any case.

For those wanting to try ubuntu on an FC2 machine, the only alternative seems to
be to wipe the disk and redo stuff from the start.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

*** Bug 8490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This also happens when the filesystem is dirty. In that case, running e2fsck on
it from tty2 fixes the problem.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 9044 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

No activity in over a year, has this been solved or is it unfixable?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(In reply to comment #13)
> No activity in over a year, has this been solved or is it unfixable?

I've heard of similar issues more recently; I don't believe either that it has
been solved or that it is unfixable.

[Lakin Wecker (lakin)]

As per colin's last comments, this is still an issue: changing status to confirmed.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm tracking this as bug 59620 now.