clone RHEL 4 ext3 partition

[Andreas Dilger]

On Jun 10, 2005  16:19 +1000, Nebid wrote:
> Thanks for replying.
> 
> dumpe2fs -h /dev/hda3 | grep feature
> yields...
> Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode
> dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super
> large_file

Well, if your filesystem has "needs_recovery" set that means it is
either mounted (which is OK as long as you do a clean unmount before
trying the clone/resize), or it needs an e2fsck run on it to clean up
the journal before doing the resize ("e2fsck /dev/hda3" will just
replay the journal, as will mounting the filesystem).

I believe the 1.37 e2fsprogs should handle all of the above features
without trouble.  It may be that Ghost doesn't understand the "resize_inode"
feature...  Having said that, if you are running the FC3 kernel on
these nodes you can use the online resize feature to do the resizing.

Mount the filesystem, then run "ext2resize -v /dev/hda3" and it will
resize to fill the partition.

> --- Andreas Dilger <adilger at clusterfs.com> wrote:
> > On Jun 08, 2005  15:16 +1000, Matt Smith wrote:
> > > I'm about to roll out a whole bunch of Redhat
> > > Enterprise 4 workstations and have run into
> > > problems cloning from the original.
> > > 
> > > Normally I would use ghost (v7.5) because it does a
> > > nice job when cloning to a different sized
> > > disk.Unfortunately it comes up with read error 29004.
> > > Looking around it seems that Symantec don't support
> > > Fedora Core 3 (with Ghost v.8 - don't know if v.9
> > > works ???).
> > > 
> > > Next option was to use dd.
> > > This worked fine but when I went to resize the
> > > partition I noticed that Redhat have removed
> > > resize2fs from e2fsprogs. 
> > > After installing the Redhat e2fsprogs
> > > source rpm (and the newest from sourceforge - I tried
> > > both) and after compiling the resize2fs binary I got
> > > an error - "Filesystem has unsupported feature(s)"
> > 
> > Both problems are likely from the same root cause -
> > namely some strange feature enabled in your filesystem.  
> > 
> > What does "dumpe2fs -h {dev} | grep feature" say
> > about your filesystem?  AFAIK the latest e2fsprogs should
> > support all the ext3 features in a released kernel.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.