lordy

Hi all,

I got fed up with Reiser's weird little corruptions every few months, and
converted all journalled filesystems (incl / ) everything back to ext3.

Now lilo still thinks my root is reiserfs and panics. I've changed
/etc/fstab and /etc/mtab.

I guess I have to load a mandriva disc and re-install boot loader?

But I didnt think this would be necessary? My /boot is on a seperate ext2
partition. But I guess the problem is that it's mounted below '/', so Lilo
needs to know in advance what FS is on root before it can get to /boot or
/etc/fstab. Bit of a chicken & egg!

Lordy

bit twister

Yep. I just installed 2007.1 and noticed it could not find the correct
loader/image for lilo on my multi-boot system in the Rescue mode.


So I picked console
mkdir /junk
mount -t auto /dev/sda15 /junk
chroot /junk
lilo -v
shutdown -r now
exit
exit

Pop out DVD.

david w. hodgins

Extracted from my latest article in the "Can't start Mandriva" thread ...

I highly recommend turning off hard drive write caching, as the small
performance gain, is greatly outweighed by the potential loss caused
by a hard reset. I learned this the hard way. Even with a journalized
file system, if the journal entries haven't been physically written
to disk, when the kernel module assumes they have, you can lose entire
file systems.

I have the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.local ...
hdparm -a 8 -d 1 -r 0 -k 1 -u 1 -m 16 -c 1 -A 1 -W 0 -S 240 /dev/hda
hdparm -a 8 -d 1 -r 0 -k 1 -u 1 -m 16 -c 1 -A 1 -W 0 -S 240 /dev/hdb


The above applies to ext3 the same as for reiserfs. I'm sticking with
reiserfs, and haven't had any problems with file system corruption,
since turning off the hard drive write caching, despite occasional
power failures. I also prefer the much faster fsck, after a clean shutdown.


Yes, as Bit Twister has posted.

Yes, I believe it needs access to /dev, /initrd, /etc, and /lib, at boot time.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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robert m. riches jr.

If I understand correctly, it is because Lilo is extremely
primitive and stores raw block numbers to get the stuff from
/boot it needs to boot up the kernel. If you make a change
to the config file or move _anything_ around in /boot, you
need to rerun the lilo program to update the MBR on where
the files are, what the config file said, etc.

The solution to that problem, IMNSHO, is to use Grub. If
you have multiple operating systems installed, I would
recomend a boot manager like SBM in the MBR with each
installation's boot loader in its own partition.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@verizon.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

unruh

"David W. Hodgins" <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org> writes:

While you may have this, you should also tell people that almost all of it
is entirely irrelevant to what you are saying. You should tell them what
all those options mean so that they do not screw up their own disks with
inappropriate options and many are default. The only one of relevance is
-W 0

The kernel is loaded from /boot, which is hard coded into the MBR. It known
nothing about filesystems, just reading sectors from the disk using the
bios. Thus lilo does not need to know anything about filesystems to load
the kernel. The kernel then needs to know so it can mount /.
Did you rerun lilo after you had changed everything?

lordy

I re-installed the boot loader. Which recognised my new root as ext3,
but when I rebooted there is still something that thinks its Reiser and
creates a panic...

The boot console says

Trying yo resume from /dev/sda8
No suspend signature on swap, not resuming.
Mounting root filesystem /dev/root with flags notail

Whatever does that last line is the cause of my problem. This is not in
/etc/fstab not /etc/mtab. The rescue disk (and knoppix) can mount my
file heirachy just fine and know that the root is ext3 (as it is in
/etc/fstab).

Some other file in lilo gubbings still thinks it's reiser??

Any ideas?

Lordy

lordy

Cheers, with my system the rescue-gui can sucessfully mount everything
under /mnt and it can also re-install the boot-loader , and it appears
to indicate it has found my root FS as ext3 as expected. However when I
reboot, something somewhere still references ReiserFS when mounting
/dev/root.

I'll try it all manually and see what happens .

(For some reason trying to install grub doesnt work - bu thats another
matter at the moment - One thing at a time

Lordy

lordy

No joy trying it manually. I even put rootfstype=ext3 in the lilo options,
and re-installed bootloader (ie re-ran lilo ), and something still thinks
my root is ReiserFS. [ /etc/fstab was correct with ext3 ].

I gave up in the end. I changed most of the other file systems to ext3.
I'll double check write-caching is disabled as suggested, and leave it at
that for now. I suspect initrd somehow has root fs type set to ReiserFS on
my system. But the fascination and intrigue has long since faded..

Lordy

lordy

I've just got -B128 in mine (some Advance Power Management setting),
I'll be disabling write caching methinks (-W 0) - I've had ReiserFS go weird
on me twice in as many months - Although I've not had any sudden power
outages or system crashes in a long time. Dont trust the bugger any more...

scott b.

I've never tried anything more complicated than switching from ext3
to ext2, but I noticed after some googling that someone mentioned
that when switching from reiserfs to ext3, formatting is required.

I didn't see in any of your articles that you had formatted.

There's a howto from December 11, 2006 for converting OpenSuSE /home
from reiserfs to ext3 at the following URL in case it helps:

http://snipurl.com/1fv1w