ext4 disaster

[Bill McGonigle]

On 06/12/2009 06:28 AM, Neal Becker wrote:
> On reboot, the kernel would not mount root,
> saying it was using unsupported features!!

as others have mentioned, probably you don't have the right modules or 
settings in your initrd.  Does fstab say 'ext4'?

>  I tried fixing with tune2fs, but
> tune2fs refuses to turn off extents.

tune2fs is just flipping a flag here, right?  So, probably once you have 
extents on a disk it's not possible to turn it off with tune2fs, as a 
safety measure.  ext4 is available in either flavor, but once you go 
with extents you lose ext3 compatibility, IIRC.  If your initrd was 
trying to mount / as ext3 this would make some sense about what you're 
seeing.

> I did a clean install of F11 from scratch, choosing default ext4.  Rebooted,
> and guess what?  Same thing!

Did you reformat as well as reinstall?  Did the initrd get recreated 
(date stamp)?

> Big question: why did anaconda mount ext4 fine, but when I try to boot off
> my hard disk the (same kernel) won't?

It could be that anaconda does detection but your initrd is hard-coded. 
  This might be another case where a bigger, auto-detecting initrd would 
help.

-Bill
-- 
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Cell: 603.252.2606
Twitter, etc.: bill_mcgonigle   Page: 603.442.1833
Email, IM, VOIP: bill at bfccomputing.com
Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf