Re: Interesting problems on a linux+xfs system.

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 02:45:52PM -0500, Nathan J. Mehl wrote:
> I'm having an interesting/frustrating problem with Parted 1.4.16 on an
> SGI XFS 1.0.1 Linux system (based on RedHat 7.1) that is preventing me
> from doing a system upgrade.
> 
> A "parted /dev/hda print" using parted 1.4.16 shows:
> 
>       Disk geometry for /tmp/hda: 0.000-73308.867 megabytes
>       Disk label type: msdos
>       Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
>       1          0.031     54.909  primary   xfs         boot
>       2         54.910  73304.406  extended              
>       5         54.940  59420.104  logical   linux-swap  
>       6      59420.136  59937.824  logical   linux-swap  
> 
> The problem with this is that hda5 is _not_ a linux-swap filesystem,
> it's an XFS filesystem.

It's probably a stale signature.  Grrr, why hasn't the old linux-swap
format been retired!!!  THe new format records the size of the
device, and Parted will see that it's completely insane, and choose
XFS instead.  (XFS doesn't occupy the entire partition either,
so, parted preferred the linux-swap signature)

>  Fdisk agrees with this assessment:

Parted ignores those partition types (as does everyone else,
except fdisk and Windows), since they are usually wildly inaccurate.
(Often enough to be worthless)

> At this point, I'm somewhat stymied.  As long as parted believes that
> hda5 is a swap partition, redhat's anaconda installer will refuse to
> install onto it, which is suboptimal since that's my root partition.
> Neither fdisk nor any of the xfs userland tools seem similarly
> confused about the fs type, and parted doesn't seem to have an option
> to change the type of a partition without rebuilding it.

You can get out a hex editor and/or dd(1), and remove the space
signature.  (It's plaintext SWAPSPACE or similar)

Sorry about the mess, but partitioning bureaucracy is full of
impossible problems :(

Andrew