Some of you may have seen this on another board, but nobody there has offered a viable solution, so hopefully the mods will forgive me.
Sorry if this is a bit lengthy, but it really is driving me round
the bend...
A few days back I received my much awaited copy of Mandrake 9.1 and am hoping to have it installed soon.
Hoping...
Toward this end, I wanted to rearrange my hd partitions a little bit. I
have a 40mB hdd and I'm currently dual booting with WinMe - the OS this
computer came with - mostly because I'm undertaking an Open University
course and their materials are Win only (otherwise I'd have ditched M$ a
few months back).
sooo...I chose to use Partition Magic (PQmagic) 8.0 to rearrange partitions. A mistake? I'm hoping someone can tell me
Anyway, to get on with it: Current setup: hda1 WinMe OS; hda2 extended
partition; hda3 Mandrake 9.0 OS; hda4 Linux swap; hda5 Windows apps; hda6 Windows data; hda7 backup. All FAT32 save for the Mandy 9.0 and swap partitions - and you should know that perhaps misguidedly, months back when I installed Mandrake, I created the partition hda3 as *ext2* not ext3.
5-7 are of course logical partitions within the extended partition.
I wanted to reduce the side of hda1, move hda3, reduce the size of hda
5,6,7, to minimum and create two new ext3 logical partitions within the
extended partition to allow separate partitions for /home and /usr.
I fed the required moves to PQmagic and went for it - the first part went
well, hda1 is now half the size it was; but the process fell over when attempting to operate on hda3. I received a critical error message:
'unconnected directory inode 3090, will reboot, press any key to continue.'
Sooo...I rebooted, fired up Mandrake in failsafe mode, ran fsck /dev/hda3.
This (apparently) found and fixed the error. I then booted back into win,
tried the PQmagic thing again...
...and the same thing happened, save that now the unconnected directory inode is 3091...
To cut a long story short, I have now run fsck four times in three
hours, each time *apparently* repairing the error; save that on investigation, another error has appeared. So far I've had critical errors
involving directory inodes 3090, 3091, 3092...(well I could go on, but it
would get monotonous).
Then, again while in failsafe mode, I ran
# ls -i | less /*
Thinking about it and with a prompt from someone on another board I should have put a grep 309* in there somewhere, but i didn't
and thus had great fun paging through quite a bit
of output, and much information about inodes, but there was no sign of any of the offending numbers.
So what have I done wrong, or what might be the problem here? Is it that I'm trying to use a DOS program to move a Linux partition? (PQmagic created the partition in the first place, with no problem). Is it my fault for using ext2 rather than ext3 originally? Or is it something else? And if so,
does anyone have any suggestion what it might be, or what I might do about it?
(OK, I know: run Mandy 9.1's partition manager....I haven't tried that yet.
Mainly because I know and love PQmagic and it does what it says on the tin - moves partitions around without losing data - and I don't know if this is
likely to be the case with Mandy's or any other Linux's partition manager.
And of course there's the sledgehammer approach...nuke the entire drive and start over...and don't think I haven't been tempted. But that's kind of a
MS-y approach, and I'd rather troubleshoot if possible.)
All suggestions gratefully received!
cheers
jd
PS Despite the error messages and so forth, everything still works, I have
access to both my OS's, and Mandrake doesn't even report any errors on boot, let alone force a fsck at boot time. But when I force a fsck it
*does* find the 'error' (if it is an error). Weird or what?