Two-cent tip: GRUB and inode sizes

René Pfeiffer [lynx at luchs.at]

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 01:07:03 +0100

Hello!

I had a decent fight with a stubborn server today. It was a Fedora Core 6 system (let's not talk about how old it is) that was scheduled for a change of disks. This is fairly straightforward - until you have to write the boot block. Unfortunately I prepared the new disks before copying the files. As soon as I wanted to install GRUB 0.97 it told me that it could not read the stage1 file. The problem is that GRUB only deals with 128-byte inodes. The prepared / partition has 256-byte inodes. So make sure to use

mkfs.ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda1

when preparing disks intended to co-exist with GRUB. I know this is old news, but I never encountered this problem before. http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6480/2/ has more hints ready.

Best, René, who is thinking about moving back to LILO.

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Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 00:11:02 +0000

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 01:07:03AM +0100, Ren? Pfeiffer wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I had a decent fight with a stubborn server today. It was a Fedora Core
> 6 system (let's not talk about how old it is) that was scheduled for a
> change of disks. This is fairly straightforward - until you have to
> write the boot block. Unfortunately I prepared the new disks before

+1 for Debian here then, who manages to get this right off the bat.

-- Thomas Adam

-- 
"It was the cruelest game I've ever played and it's played inside my head."
-- "Hush The Warmth", Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

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Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:14:49 +0700

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 7:07 AM, René Pfeiffer <lynx@luchs.at> wrote:

> that it could not read the stage1 file. The problem is that GRUB only
> deals with 128-byte inodes. The prepared / partition has 256-byte
> inodes. So make sure to use
>
> mkfs.ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda1
>
> when preparing disks intended to co-exist with GRUB. I know this is old
> news, but I never encountered this problem before.
> http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6480/2/ has more hints
> ready.

Never thought about that before. Thanks for the tip!

-- 
regards,

Freelance Linux trainer and consultant

blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com training: mulyaditraining.blogspot.com

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