Re: resize + cp -> wrong size + request for help

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 05:21:10PM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
> Does "other tools" refer to mke2fs (or perhaps my umount?) or can even
> something innocuous like ls or a file browser cause the problem?

Yes.  *ANYTHING* that writes to it.  You must exit parted first
(or run some other mechanism that flushes the cache... but this
may not be sufficient, if the partition was grown... long story,
all explained in the manual)

> I meant just fixing the damage on my disk.  From your remarks below,
> it sounds as if I should just reformat and try again.

e2fsck will probably fix everything.

> Just out of curiosity, aren't there some absolute sector references
> embedded in the file system?

Of course not!

> As I said, I know there's a case to be made that the cp is OK.  It
> just seems pretty easy to interpret it the other way, and giving it
> some other name makes the program more idiot-proof.

Another option is to ask for confirmation.

I'm not too excited about changing the interface too much.

> Though CHS is unnatural, it is one way (and originally the canonical
> way) the partition table is specified, even though the large size of
> disks has rendered it pretty useless.  So it seems natural for a
> partition manager to work in those terms.

s/to work/to be able to work/

That is only partially true.  Macintosh partition maps, for example,
know nothing about CHS geometry (and Parted supports them ;)

> One issue with other units (excepting cylinders) is that it's pretty
> easy to end up on a non-cylinder boundary.  I gather at least some
> tools and systems don't like that.  Perhaps there could be an option
> for rounding to the boundaries, or a warning if you're off them?

Parted always attempts to align properly to cylinder boundaries.
What you type is NOT what you get (although, if satisfying all
constraints means something significantly different to what you
asked for, Parted will ask for confirmation)

> P.S.  Of course, if you added NTFS that would be great.  The NTFS
> driver for Linux seems pretty stable for reading, but I suppose it
> needs to be stable for writing to even think about borrowing from it
> for NTFS move/resize.

It's not relevant.  I intend to implement in userland on top of libntfs.

Andrew