cant format partition using mke2fs
 

hello firends

i wanted to device dump my lfs system into new harddisk .
the partition was FAT32 and i ran command as follows:

mke2fs /dev/hdc1

where hdc is new hdd

the command executed successfully but than in

fdisk -l

that partition was showed as fat32 only.....


i dont understand why this happened....


i tried to continue with the same....
i ran command as...

dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hdc1

this command showed whole directory proper as in my base system (/dev/hda7)
so i thought it would work....i made necessary changes in menu.lst

but while booting i got
GEom error

please help me out for this

thnak you in advance

"dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hdc1

this command showed whole directory proper as in my base system (/dev/hda7)
so i thought it would work....i made necessary changes in menu.lst

but while booting i got
GEom error"

Whenever you use dd to copy between hard disks with different geometries you leave yourself open to geometry errors. The best solution is to create /dev/hdc1 again and this time leave dd out of the picture.

"mke2fs /dev/hdc1

where hdc is new hdd

the command executed successfully but than in

fdisk -l

that partition was showed as fat32 only.....


i dont understand why this happened...."

mke2fs does nothing to the partition table. If the partition table said fat32 before you ran mke2fs it will say fat32 after you ran mke2fs. Linux doesn't care what the partition table thinks the file system is so the erroneous file system type in the partition table is irrelevant.


----------------------------
Steve Stites

I have two things to say:

1) You will probably want ext3 over ext2, when you use mke2fs /dev/hdc1 you create an ext2 partition. instead use mke2fs -j /dev/hdc1 (you can also pass -L PartitionName to give the partition a name also)

2) As answered in the other post, the system will still be labeled fat32, vfat, or whatever. To fix this and make it look the way you want it to type this: [i]fdisk /dev/hdc1[i]
Once there you can press m for help. It will show you a list of commands. From there, you can use the t command to change it to ext3 and you may need to use the w command to write your changes. I don't use this enough to remember the specifics, so hopefully this helps point you in the correct direction.