Partition Resize Problem

Parksy · 08-26-2003, 02:39 PM

I had a dual-boot system on one hard drive. Before my escapades, my partitions were in this order:

NTFS | FAT32 | ext3 | swap | ext2

The ext3 partition had / and the ext2 partition had /home. I need more room in linux, so I decided to use Partition Magic to shrink the FAT32 partition and make the newly allocated space into another ext2 partition. I thought about merging and rearranging the partitions, but I decided against it just to be safe.

Unfortunately, Partition Magic threw an error during the process - it was something about an unsupported version of the filesystem. Currently windows boots fine. The FAT32 drive is smaller and all its data is intact. However, linux won't boot. I get this error message:

Code:

ext3: No journal on filesystem on ide 0 (3,6)
mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed
kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

What does this mean? Is any data retrievable? What would Partition Magic have done to the ext3 partition that I didn't want it to touch?

_kossak_ · 08-26-2003, 02:46 PM

You created a new partition before the linux one.
So your linux partition moved from (for example) hda3 to hda4.

You need to pass the kernel option root=/dev/hda4 (the new partition) to boot and then change it in /etc/fstab.

Mara · 08-26-2003, 02:55 PM

It looks like your Prtition Magic doesn't support ext3. I hope the data is readable, probably it converted the partition to ext2. Why? You've choosen to make the ext3 partition bigger, right? So PM had to write it...

Boot from mandrake installation cd (choose 'rescue') mode. Now you need to try to mount the former ext3 partition. It's something like this:
mkdir /mnt/linux
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdaX /mnt/linux
(of course, replace /dev/hdaX with the right name, if unsure use 'fdisk /dev/hda' and then 'p' to see partitions and 'q' to quit).

If the mount's successful, cd to the /mnt/linux directory and see if your data looks OK. What you can do now:
1) Convert the partition to ext3 and reboot. The commands are:
umount /mnt/linux
tune2fs -j /dev/hdaX
Then reboot, you may have problems with lilo, so you rather need to reinstall it (before reboot, or after second boot from th rescue cd).
Use:
mount /dev/hdaX /mnt/linux
chown /mnt/linux
Now you have access to all programs installed in your system (so you can use Midnight Commander etc), just remember to set PATH.

What you need to do is simple:
lilo
Then reboot.

2) You can edit /mnt/linux/etc/fstab and change your main partition type to ext2, then reinstall lilo as above and reboot. After Mandrake start, you can convert the partition back to ext3.

Parksy · 08-27-2003, 09:51 AM

I didn't ask Partition Magic to resize the ext3 partition - I just got it to make a new ext2 partition in the empty space. It turns out that PM didn't touch the ext3 filesystem at all. The whole problem was the hda numbers.

I used the rescue cd to edit fstab and lilo.conf, but I couldn't get lilo to run. However, once fstab was fixed I was able to boot with the root=/dev/hda7 option and the swap & /home partitions were loaded correctly during boot. Back in KDE I was able to run lilo and everything was fine from then.

Thanks a lot for helping me through this!

Unfortunately, my original problem remains.