Bug 149159

Summary: ext3 partitions from Fedora cannot be checked by other distros e2fsprogs
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Karsten Becker <karstenrbecker>
Component: e2fsprogsAssignee: Thomas Woerner <twoerner>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 3CC: sct
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
URL: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-297258.html
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-02-22 14:32:09 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Karsten Becker 2005-02-19 16:16:10 UTC
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Description of problem:
I was using Fedora Core 3 for AMD64  to create ext3 partitions. I
installed Gentoo on it. When trying to boot, I get error messages from
the filesystem check

fsck.ext3: Filesystem has unsupported feature(s) (/)
e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!

and bail out into the maintenance console. It's no problem to mount
the partition, but you cannot run e2fsck on it. You'll always get that
message shown above.

After re-formatting the ext3 partitions under Gentoo and Knoppix there
were no more problems.

A second thing I wondered about was a log-file in Fedora's
/var/log-directory, that was shown with a size of 1.2TByte from out of
Gentoo. I only have a 160Gb harddrive, so it's impossible.

It's not only me who was affected by this behaviour. So a defect of my
 harddrive cannot be the cause.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
e2fsprogs-1.35-11.2

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Format a partition with ext3 under Fedora Core 3 for AMD64.
2. Boot Gentoo Linux.
3. Gentoo will bailout before mounting local filesystems during the
initial check.

    

Actual Results:  ext3 partitions formatted with Fedora are not useable
for other distros.

Expected Results:  ext3 partitions should be useable from every
distro, regardless which distro was used to create them. If everything
goes bad, a loss of data can be caused by this behaviour.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Stephen Tweedie 2005-02-22 14:32:09 UTC
First of all, every new feature of ext3 requires an e2fsprogs upgrade.
 That has applied in the past to features like large file support,
EA/ACLs, htree directories and sparse superblocks.  It now applies to
the online resize functionality.

This is not a bug.  Use a newer e2fsck, or format without the new feature.

As for the 1.2TB file in /var/log/, I guess that's the lastlog file. 
That's a sparse file which contains one entry for each user, and if
you have a large uid (typically the nobody or nfsnobody user), that
creates a block near the end of the file.  So the file's size as
reported by ls -l looks large; but the amount of space it occupies, as
shown by "du", will be small.

This, too, is not a bug.