Re: [opensuse] ReiserFS partitions recognized as Ext3. How to recover? - Definitely a bug

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Carlos E. R.
<robin.listas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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On 02/07/2010 07:42 AM, Mark Goldstein wrote:
On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Mike McMullin <mwmcmlln@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 2010-02-06 at 14:25 +0200, Mark Goldstein wrote:
On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Mike McMullin <mwmcmlln@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 21:12 +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:
...
How I made it ext3 - I do not know.

Apologies for misleading (If I misled anybody except myself),

 I have found out the hard way, that looking at the config/reference
files tells me things about my system that I thought I knew but didn't,
/etc/fstab is the most logical indicator of how things were setup/ought
to be.  So I asked.

Thank you Mike. Actually Carlos told me from the very beginning that
it is not possible, but I was so absolute sure I did not use ext3...
And indeed all other computers I was using were reiserfs. But not this
one.
Stupid me. Will check and re-check myself next time :-(.

Well... it just happened to me. :-O

I had just installed 11.2_x64 on another partition, formatted as reiserfs - I'm definitely sure of
this. I recovered some data from a backup of a previous install. Then I filled the fstab from
another copy, and, big mistake, rewrote the root entry as _ext3_. Rebooted.

No error was reported. But... there were strange things. I copied them:

mount said:

/dev/sda9 on / type ext3 (rw,acl,user_xattr)

fstab said:

LABEL=a_test2           /               ext3            acl,user_xattr          1 1

"file -s /dev/sda9" said:

/dev/sda9: ReiserFS V3.6


boot.msg log said:

<5>[    3.104641] REISERFS (device sda9): found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
<5>[    3.104652] REISERFS (device sda9): using ordered data mode
<4>[    3.104653] reiserfs: using flush barriers
<5>[    3.105080] REISERFS (device sda9): journal params: device sda9, size 8192, journal first
block 18, max trans len 1024, max batch 900,
<5>[    3.105360] REISERFS (device sda9): checking transaction log (sda9)
<5>[    3.146242] REISERFS (device sda9): Using r5 hash to sort names


Ie, it is and was a reiserfs partition, but mount wrongly reported that it was ext3. There is
definitely a bug here.

(I corrected the fstab and rebooted; things are correct now and no damage seems to have come out of
it... (I did not try to fsck). I'll keep my fingers crossed)


And I'm very, very surprissed :-(


So quick... I hope it is not an e-mail communicable infection :-(

It looks like though there is a signature in the superblock and
probably some other ways to find out the partition type, the mount
takes the type specified in fstab without further checking. It should
at least compare what is specified in fstab with the result of file
-s.

Regards,
--
Mark Goldstein
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