Bug 119712

Summary: bad advice when mounting ext2/ext3 root filesystem fails
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: John Reiser <jreiser>
Component: initscriptsAssignee: Bill Nottingham <notting>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact: Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: rvokal, sct, twoerner
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: FC4 Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-09-30 20:41:43 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description John Reiser 2004-04-01 18:36:17 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040312

Description of problem:
When mounting the root filesystem fails, and /etc/fstab claims that it
should be ext2 or ext3, then the console gives bad advice when it
suggests "e2fsck -b 8193 <device>".  This is only for non-sparse_super
filesystems.  Most ext2/ext3 filesystems are now sparse_super (this
has been the default for a couple years), so the advice should be
updated (and the corresponding block number is 32768 or 98304).

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
initscripts-7.48-1

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Change /etc/fstab so that the mount point for the root filesystem
does not exist, but the partition does contain an ext2 or ext3
filesystem with sparse_super.  For example, for the root filesystem:
-----
LABEL=/         /does_not_exist    ext3    defaults        1 1
-----
2. Reboot.
3.
    

Actual Results:  -----
Checking root filesystem
fsck.ext2: /:
The superIs a directory while trying to open /
block could not be read or does not describe a correct ...
        e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
-----
where the intermixing of stdout and stderr does occur, and one
instance is quoted above.

Expected Results:  List the block number for sparse_super, too:
        e2fsck -b 8193 <device>  # non-sparse_super [older or smaller]
        e2fsck -b 32768 <device>  # sparse_super [typically newer]

Additional info:

Comment 1 Thomas Woerner 2004-10-19 09:27:19 UTC
Ok, the first problem is the message. I have send the author of
e2fsprogs an email about this. It will be fixed in the next version, I
think.

The second problem is that e2fsck is called with the -a flag. It
should be considered to run fsck without -a, then fsck.ext2 and
fsck.ext3 is repairing the filesystem automatically with trying backup
blocks. 
Reassigning to initscripts.


Comment 2 Bill Nottingham 2004-10-20 01:57:50 UTC
Running without -a? I don't think we really want to start prompting.

Comment 3 Bill Nottingham 2005-09-30 20:41:43 UTC
Closing bugs on older, no longer supported, releases. Apologies for any lack of
response.

Please try to reproduce this on a current release, such as Fedora Core 4. If the
issue persists, please open a new issue. I believe the original problem (the
error message) has since been solved.