EXT2 -fs warning (device sda1): ext2_fill_super:mounting ext3 filesystem as ext2
 

Im the process of installing gentoo and following the instructions from gentoo.org, after creating my partitions, i proceeded to mount them as instructed by the installation handbook. after entering the code, i got the message listed as my title. can anyone tell me what this means or if i'm doing anything wrong? thanks in advance

If sda1 is your /boot partition and has actually ext2 filesystem then you can safely ignore this message.

You're trying to mount ext3 partition as ext2. Try to mount with -t ext3 instead of -t ext2

In my case its not sda1, but hda1 and my /boot partition is ext2.

I was getting same warning and I figured out how to solve this. The problem was, that filesystem was created with journaling. I used tune2fs to remove journaling from filesystem like that:
And now it boots up nicely. To look, if fs has journaling ( ext fs ) use tune2fs:

I have Slackware 11.0, do you know which script boots the / partition. That is my ext3 partition where I am getting this error message. I'd love to check to see what it says.

/ is mounted using data from /etc/fstab. Is that ext3 your /? If so, what does /etc/fstab show?

my /etc/fstab shows ext3. The only possible change that I made that might affect this was upgrading the kernel to 2.6.18. Now I know that is a significant change but it should be able to support ext3 and to answer your question no I did not compile this kernel this is off of slackware 11.0's testing directoryb