| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
peter4
Guru
Joined: 19 Jul 2005
Posts: 359
Location: Wroclaw, Poland
|
 Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 12:34 pm Post subject: changing inode size with tune2fs: 2 questions |
 |
|
Hi,
when I was looking for a way to convert my ext3 filesystem to ext4 I found this: http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4
The conversion itself went fine and without problems. However I noticed the innocent looking statement: | Quote: | If the filesystem was created with 128 byte inodes, it can be converted to use 256 byte for greater efficiency via: | Code: | $ tune2fs -I 256 /dev/DEV
|
|
So I downloaded the most recent Gentoo minimal livecd (it's my root partition and it must be unmounted first) and ran the command.
The f***er is now running for more than 10 hours straight and doesn't seem to be about to finish - and it's starting to drive me nuts. The CPU activity from tune2fs process is at 100% all the time, but disk activity is next to none.
So here are the questions:
1) How much longer will it take on 250GB filesystem (about 200GB of which is used)?
2) Am I right to presume that interrupting it will result in f***ed up filesystem?
Any advice will be much appreciated  |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54328
Location: 56N 3W
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 2:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
peter4,
I cant tell how long it may take and yes, stopping it is a bad idea.
See this bug
tune2fs -I 256 is also not safe, see this link
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
Last edited by NeddySeagoon on Fri Dec 26, 2008 8:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
niuck
n00b
Joined: 16 Mar 2005
Posts: 60
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:52 pm Post subject: |
|
|
For me it took about 20h on a full 160gb pata. I wish i had done a little more research before playing with this. =)
A normal mkfs.ext4 is the way to go atm. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
peter4
Guru
Joined: 19 Jul 2005
Posts: 359
Location: Wroclaw, Poland
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 9:13 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I did interrupt this after about 15hrs. Then I booted the system and started backing up data when fs hit some error and remounted itself read-only. I rebooted the system after the backup finished and fsck kicked in. It found some errors, the system rebooted and now everything works well. E2fsck when re-ran claims that the partition is fine. I've done some testing on the partition, like emerging gentoo-sources a few times and syncing the tree and no error was reported. Could it be that i might actually get away with this?
BTW tune2fs -l says that inode size is still 128. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gef
Apprentice
Joined: 17 May 2008
Posts: 180
Location: France
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 10:01 pm Post subject: |
|
|
For me, "tune2fs -I 256" went fine on my ext2 /boot (32MB).
With my 5.0GB /home, it did only havoc : i interrupted it before the end, tried fsck. I rebooted, and fsck the partition. All the filename/dirname tree has been corrupted. I just tared the whole lost+found dir (wich contained 3.0G+ borked files with numerical filenames), rsynced it to external usbdrive, and mkfs on the /dev/sdX file. I should have done it this way before.
Happily, i had a full backup (minus a few files i was able to find in the lost+found archive). 
I postponed the thing for '/ ' until i have the time to make a brand new ext4 partition.
_________________
Laptop : Gentoo ~amd64
(remote) Server : Gentoo amd64 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
poly_poly-man
Advocate
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 2477
Location: RIT, NY, US
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 10:32 pm Post subject: |
|
|
wow... you guys have wayyyy too much patience - my computer also happens to be the router and dns/dhcp servers for my network, so I had to migrate quickly.
Anyway, adding extents didn't take very long, and then I did that inode thing... some errors rolled by, but they stopped. After a few minutes (maybe 5?), I killed it, and tried it again - same errors went by, killed it after longer (maybe 10 minutes)...
Just to make sure, I ran a complete fsck, and it picked up 0 errors. I rebooted, and so far it's working perfectly (and I'm noticing some definite speed improvements - especially in deleting files)
229G partition, according to df -h.
_________________
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA
avatar: new version of logo - see topic 838248. Potentially still a WiP. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Other Things Gentoo
