Hi!

I have a Slackware Linux 9.1 and a root partition with ReiserFS. I can't get quota working. On startup it gives a notice:

WARNING: bad format on line 3 of /etc/fstab
Remounting root device with read-write enabled
reiserfs_getopt: unknown option "usrquota"
mount: / not mounted already, or bad option

Attempt to remount root device as read-write failed! This is going to cause serious problems.

<Some problem-solving text>

Please press ENTER to continue, then reboot and use one of the above methods to get into your machine and start looking for the problem.


/etc/fstab:

/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs defaults,usrquota 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

I have compiled kernel 2.4.23 with quota enabled and booted to it but it still doesn't seem to work... I have no quota-patches for kernel since I didn't find any from the ftp-site provided with quota mini-howto (of which I have followed all of the steps of "quota setup: installation and configuration"). I don't know if some information's missing from this message, please do tell me if there's something missing

P.S. I'm not exactly sure if I've put the step 3.4 of quota-howto to right place... I put the text to /etc/rc.d/rc.S starting from line 139, which is right after remounting the root partition.

Any help to help get this working is most welcome

Resierfs has poor support for using quota's and at most times will not work without patches. I do believe there are patches out there, by doing a search on "reiserfs" and "quota" I came across thousands of hits on google.com/linux and many were issues and sites regarding this, adding patches to get it working, etc.

Personally I would probably suggest to save you time and grief in trying to get it working, choose a more stable filesystem to use if your going to want quota's enabled. ext3 works flawlessly and has the journaled file system as well.

I personally tend to stay away from reiserfs, I see too many small tedious problems like this and I even think Redhat now doesn't even offer it as a filesystem no longer.

Cheers.

Hmm... Okay, I need to keep in mind so that if sometimes I need to reinstall the system I use ext3... The only thing is that my system is quite much customized already and I don't in fact even know what changes I've made to it... Well if I don't get it working, I just need to reinstall the whole system. Or can it be easily moved to another partition and is it easy to get it working there if the partition is another type than it was before?

By the way, when I have kernel 2.4.23 source, are the patches at http://ftp.tuniv.szczecin.pl/pub/lin...quota-patches/ usable? Their version number seems to be 2.4.0...

I didn't see any specific patches for 2.4.23 myself, didn't search that far but I did see patches for 2.4.22. You might want to check out www.linuxhq.com which usually has tons of patches, updates for the kernel.