Re: Bug in parted - fs too big

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi Philippe,

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 09:17:51AM +0100, Philippe Froidevaux wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a problem with GNU Parted 1.6.3, on linux RedHat 7.3. I tried to 
> expand an LVM (and then, in a second try, a simple SCSI) partition from 
> 1.2Tb to 1.6Tb.

What platform?  (x86?)

> But I got :
> 
> 1/ a warning : parted said it is neither a SCSI disk, nor an IDE. I can 
> "Ignore or Cancel", and choose to Ignore, so it's not a real problem. It 
> work fine on little partitions (I tried with partition size < 100 Gb, 
> with both LVM and SCSI). But it gives me the message with both LVM and 
> standard SCSI disks. SCSI should be detected...

Perhaps it's on a strange major/minor?  Like you say, it's nothing
to worry about.

> 2/ an error : on the LVM part, the command "parted /dev/vg00/lv01 check" 
> gave me a *negative* value for the partition size !

That's no good!  That said, it's probably a formatting error.

> Then the program 
> freeze while growing the partition - I leave it running more than 6 
> hours. I didn't try whith the SCSI disks (I can't currently umount this 
> partition, sorry).

This makes no sense to me.

> So my questions :
> - can I pass this size limitations, and how ?

They're probably bugs.  The best solution is to fix the bugs :)

> - maybe it were a good idea to document this limits in the man page :)

The limits are bugs, not "limitations".

> - how can I give you more information for debugging ?

I can't get 2.4.x working on my machine, and user-mode-linux is
very inconvenient, but either of these options would allow me to
try large very large sparse file support to test TB disks (without
needing one).  I'll do this when I have a chance (still got exams).

Do you know how to use gdb?  Basic steps:

(1) get source, untar
(2) CFLAGS=-g ./configure && make
(3) $ cd parted
(4) $ su
(5) # libtool gdb parted
(6) (gdb) set args [big disk]
(7) (gdb) run
(8) (parted)  [do something]
(9) hit ctrl-c when parted hangs
(10) (gdb) backtrace

Sending the output of (8) and (10) should be very useful.
Thanks!

> And a request :
> - it should be usefull to add a "progress bar" when parted is growing a 
> partition. I didn't know if 'parted' was frozen or working :)

Parted does have a progress bar.  Apparantly it get itself into a knot
before starting to display it.

Parted waits a couple of seconds before displaying a progress bar
to collect a big enough sample to make reasonable statistics, and
to avoid flashing a bar on-off very quickly for small operations.

Thanks,
Andrew