Re: Filesystem creation

Riley Williams
2002-05-12T20:04:46Z

Hi Lars.

> As being new to this list, first a short introduction: Living 15 km
> outside the nearest town with my woman and four cats. Working as a
> lathe-turner in town. I have been interested in and tinkered with
> computers since the late seventies, more actively since late
> eighties. Could afford to buy my first DOS-box (second hand XT)
> 1989. Since then the zoo has grown a bit. Installed Linux for the
> first time somewhere late 1998.

Similar to my own experience in many ways, although the years vary
slightly.

> Got LRP running on an old crappy 386 to network my modem a year
> later. Fiddle with muLinux now and then. Never done any serious
> programming of any sort, just small bits and pieces in Basic,
> Pascal, assembler, DOS batch, shellscript. Enough of this.

I've done a lot more programming though...

> I was glad when I found out about ELKS a while ago (2-3 yrs) and
> even gladder to see that there now are ready-to-go floppy images.
> I'm trying to run the image "comb" on an IBM PS/2-30.

I don't know that particular model, but have a PS/2-70 here and that has
an ESDI hard drive.

> It boots OK and runs as I expect. But when I try to make a file
> system on the harddisk and mount it, I bump into something.
>
> fdisk reports 773 cyl, 2 heads, 27 sec.
>
> /dev/bda1 * 0 1 6 1 27 385 1 20520
> /dev/bda2 * 0 1 386 1 27 695 80 16740
> /dev/bda3 * 0 1 696 1 27 772 80 4158
>
> mkfs /dev/bda2 5859 finishes OK, but a following fsck /dev/bda2
> produces an error message, fsck: bad magic number in super-block.
>
> If I reduce the number of blocks by one, to 5858, fsck finishes
> without error message.
>
> Mounting the new fs under /mnt goes OK, but ls /mnt gives error
> messages.
>
> /mnt:
> Bad inode number on dev 0302: 3677 is out of range
> Bad inode number on dev 0302: 11330 is out of range
> (some garbage on this line)
>
> Trying to repair the fs with fsck -a desn't seem to do any good.
>
> If I reduce the number of blocks further, down to 5666, I get no
> error messages anywhere. Mounting, unmounting, making directories,
> copying files seems to work OK.
>
> Did I bump into anything but my own ignorance?

Probably only the same problem I'm having - I don't have the foggiest
how to calculate the figure to use on the mkfs line. The figures
produced and used by the various tools appear to bear no resemblance
to each other in any shape or form.

Perhaps somebody with a bit more knowledge can arrange for the ELKS mkfs
tool to auto-calculate the correct figure given the partition to use?
Probably hoping too much, but...

> I realize I know too little about the minix fs. Google produces a
> lot of links but the first few pages contained no link to a spec.
> Anybody got a good URL to a little detail on minix fs?

I tried asking Copernic for "Minix File System specification" and only
came up with a spec for the umsdos file system, not what you're after,
so can't help...

> Does steel wool come from metal sheep?

Probably...

Best wishes from Riley.