Re: mkfs.btrfs broken

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>]

On 3/7/13 9:09 AM, Swâmi Petaramesh wrote:
> Le 07/03/2013 14:37, Eric Sandeen a écrit :
>> What error messages does it emit, anything helpful? 
> 
> root@partedmagic:~# file -s /dev/sda5
> /dev/sda5: data
> 
> root@partedmagic:~# mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda5
> 
> WARNING! - Btrfs v0.20-rc1 IS EXPERIMENTAL
> WARNING! - see http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org before using
> 
> error checking /dev/sda5 mount status

Ok, so that's unhelpful isn't it.  :)

> root@partedmagic:~# echo $?
> 1
> 
>> The option is quite new, and still exists upstream. But it only forces
>> overwrite of an existing filesystem, it has never affected the mount
>> status check AFAIK. 
> 
> I remember that, in the past, I was several time able to override this
> very error by using a -f switch...
> 

maybe it was some non-upstream hack I'm not aware of.

>> There are also steps you could take to investigate some more yourself:
>> Did earlier versions of the livecd work for you? If so, when did it break?
> 
> It was broke first time I tried to use it more than a year ago ; I don't
> clearly remember if it has been fixed at some point in time... I'm
> positively sure that I saw the exact same error on other live distros
> (possibly Ubuntu but not sure...)
> 
>> Can you capture an strace of the failing mkfs.btrfs? -Eric 
> I don't know how to do this, I'm no developper myself...

# strace -o tracefile.txt mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda5

tracefile.txt will contain all syscalls made by the binary and their results,
which might give us a clue what's gone wrong.

-Eric

> Kind regards.
>