I managed successfully to partiton laptop's HD (40 GB) to install windows 2000 server, and FC3, and Solaris 10.

It was working ok for about one week.

Then I realized,I could not boot FC3 (but still windows and Solaris ok), when I used 'VCOM System Commander' utility I noticed that one of the Linux partititon which was ext3, has been changed to NTFS!!!! (I do not how, by itself or I had done something unintentionally).

Now how can I convert the NTFS to ext3 again ?

The partition filesystem type that you see displayed by fdisk, etc. does NOT necessarily reflect how the fs is really formatted.

Go into fdisk and play with the “t” command (see the listing “l” of fs types). You can change the displayed partition type and have no impact on the actual fs, but you may start getting boot warning/error messages.

If a partition really is formatted as ext3, then you should be able to successfully run e2fsck on it.

Sorry, I left out an important comment:

Using fdisk or its equivalent, try changing the fs type of the FC3 partition to 83 (ext3) and then try booting FC3.

Did you mean fdisk from DOS CD, or FC3's fdisk ?

Use linux fdisk.

Presumably, Solaris also has fdisk or its equivalent. You can always boot into FC3 rescue mode using either the first FC3 installation CD (boot: linux rescue) or the FC3 Rescue CD and run fdisk.

This is what happend to me:

1- Throught "My Computer" icon (windows OS), still I can see (which I should not) the partition that is belong to linux (/usr)!!! but I can not (It should be like this) see the other Linux partitons /, /boot, /home.

2- When I used (windows OS) the utility called "explore2fs" I was able to see (/, /boot, /home) but not /usr.!!!!


3- I used FC3 CD1 and in the rescue mode, I found (fdisk -l) that the /usr partition is still type "ext3" with id 83, not type of NTFS or FAT32!!!!!.

Now the problem when I boot into FC3, I received this erro message :

fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve 'LABEL=/usr1' FAILED.


*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot.
*** When you leave the shell.
*** Warning -- SELinux is active.
*** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
*** Run 'setenforce 1' to reenable.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):



This is not the first time I am receiving this error message, I experienced the same problem before (at that time I installed every thing again from scratch).

How odd.

The reason for 1 and 2 is not obvious to me. When seen by itself, 3 usually just means the the label/name of the partition has been changed from what is expected by /etc/fstab.

If the only problem was 3, I would normally suggest either changing the partition label to the expected name using e2label or editing /etc/fstab to use the device name instead of LABEL=/usr1.

But with all three “errors”, you should check whether the /usr1 partition ext3 filesystem is damaged by running e2fsck from FC3 rescue mode:

e2fsck -f /dev/...

1- Could you please explain more, what did you mean by : "to use the device name instead of ----"

2- If I want to use the command: e2label , how can I use it (what will be the fisr argument and the second argument?).

3- why has the name been changed from /usr to /usr1 ? This is not the first time happend to me.

4- Do I need to run the e2fsck first, or e2label first ?

1) If the partition corresponding to /usr1 was /dev/hda3, then you could substitute “/dev/hda3” for any occurrence of “LABEL=/usr1” in fstab. In the case of “LABEL=/”, you would need to make changes in grub.conf, too.

2) Any time you run into a problem with a command, just look at the man page for it. They may not be pretty, but they will give you (most) available options and how to use the command. For example,

man e2label

To look at the label of /dev/hda3, you would run:

e2label /dev/hda3

If you want to change it to something else, you would run:

e2label /dev/hda3 something_else...

The man page describes the naming length restrictions.

3) Since two partitions should not have the same label when you are using the LABEL= option for identifying them, the autoinstallers will increment the name by “1" if the folder name is already the name of another partition.

Solaris probably has a /usr partition, so FC created one named /usr1. Poke around the Solaris installation and you will probably find a partition named /usr. On a system with 4 linux installations, it is common to find partitions named /, /1, /2 and /3, corresponding to the “/” partition for each installation.

4) It shouldn’t matter, but e2fsck is probably the more important one in your case.

.
I booted my linux box through CD1 and then "F5" for rescue mode, and then command : "linux rescue", and then I tried vi /etc/fstab...

I could not find file fstab,,,,,,,,,,,,.

Assuming that you did not search for or mount the FC installation from rescue mode, then you need to mount the partition containing /etc before you can edit fstab.

For example, if “/” and “/etc” are in /dev/hda2, then

mkdir /mnt/temp
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/temp
cd /mnt/temp/etc
vi fstab
cd /
umount /mnt/temp

That will even work if you did search for and mount the FC installation.

What I did:

vi /etc/fstab

1- I changed: LABEL=/usr1 to LABEL=/usr-------------> it did not work.

2- I changed : LABEL=/usr1 to /dev/hda6 (my case /usr is hda6 and file system type ext3)----> it did not work also.

3- I run : e2fsck -f /dev/hda6

I received this message:

" e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda6

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>----------- ".


4- I run e2label /dev/hda6

I received this message:

" e2label: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda6
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock ".

Sounds like it’s corrupted. Not good.

At this point, you should consider a fresh installation.

To absolutely make sure that FC does not try to reuse the existing partitions, you should use fdisk in rescue mode to delete the FC partitions before you reinstall.

As you know, I have got 3 OSs, and I am scared if I reinstall FC3, I won't be able to boot solaris OS.