How to non-destructively make ext2 filesystem recognized by parted?

[Ole Bøssing Christensen]

Dear all,

After some failed runs with parted it does not
recognize my root partition as an ext2 filesystem anymore, though
fdisk and the system do. Once in a while it is identified as swap,
mostly it is blank. I would very much like to fix this in order to
enlarge the partition without
having to reinstall my system. Any clues will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance! /Ole

My story: I run RedHat 6.2 on a 60GB disk partitioned as shown below. As
preparation to upgrading to RedHat 7.1 I wanted to enlarge the root
partition and thus had to move stuff around.

I booted from tomsrtbt, ran parted 1.4.11 from a floppy and tried to
resize the existing very large (55GB) data partition, 24% full, to a
smaller size as part of moving stuff around. After a very long time the
program crashed with a register dump. Booting the system after that
did not show any change in the partitions, though the system was a bit
flaky with fsck to be used occasionally. Then I downloaded the boot
image with parted from gnu.org, retried the resize, but after an hour's
disk activity the program froze w/o disk activity and I reset the
computer. All this is
OK, I can backup my data and recreate the big partition if needed. My
problem is that something happened to the file type of my root partition
in the mean time...

The system boots and runs fine; fdisk, sfdisk, and cfdisk recognize the
root partition as ext2, but parted does not recognize any file system
type and refuses to manipulate (enlarge) this partition.

I found a thread a few months back with the advice to reset the first 1k
of the disk:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda5 bs=1k count=1
I did that, and it makes no difference to the behavior.

I have now realized that I could get around all this by creating a new
partition for /usr or such, but I am not happy to have some partition
table error lurking around.

Details:
--------------------------------
# parted /dev/hda print
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-58644.140 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031     23.532  primary   ext2        boot
2         23.533  58643.525  extended              
5         23.563   3027.875  logical               
6       3027.907   3545.595  logical   linux-swap  
7       3545.626  58643.525  logical   ext2        
--------------------------------
# fdisk /dev/hda -l

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1         3     24066   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             4      7476  60026872+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5             4       386   3076416   83  Linux
/dev/hda6           387       452    530113+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           453      7476  56420248+  83  Linux
#  fdisk /dev/hda

(truncated)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1         3     24066   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             4      7476  60026872+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5             4       386   3076416   83  Linux
/dev/hda6           387       452    530113+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           453      7476  56420248+  83  Linux

Command (m for help): x

Expert command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 7476 cylinders

Nr AF  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size ID
 1 80   1   1    0 254  63    2       63    48132 83
 2 00   0   1    3 254  63 1023    48195120053745 05
 3 00   0   0    0   0   0    0        0        0 00
 4 00   0   0    0   0   0    0        0        0 00
 5 00   1   1    3 254  63  385       63  6152832 83
 6 00   1   1  386 254  63  451       63  1060227 82
 7 00   1   1  452 254  63 1023       63112840497 83

# df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              3028080   1077976   1796284  38% /
/dev/hda1                23302      2442     19657  11% /boot
/dev/hda7             55533852  14046980  38665860  27% /priv_1
(truncated)
---------------------------------------------------------------
-- 
Ole Bøssing Christensen, PhD 
http://www.dmi.dk/f+u/klima/klimasektion/obc.html
Climate Res. Div./Danish Climate Center         Phone : (+45) 39 15 74 26
Danish Meteorological Institute                 Fax:    (+45) 39 15 74 60
Lyngbyvej 100, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark    E-mail: mailto:address@hidden