Re: document ext3 requirements

Martin MOKREJŠ
2009-01-03T23:50:49Z

Duane Griffin wrote:
> 2009/1/3 Martin MOKREJŠ <mmokrejs@ribosome.natur.cuni.cz>:
>> Hmm, so if my dual-boot machine does not shutdown correctly and I boot
>> accidentally in M$ Win where I use ext2 IFS driver and modify some
>> stuff on the ext3 drive, after a while reboot to linux and the journal
>> get re-played ... Mmm ...
>
> You *really* wouldn't want to be doing that.
>
> The other scenario that people have reported trouble with is
> suspending the system, booting a live CD which "read-only" mounts the
> filesystem (and replays the journal), then resuming.

Why does not "mount -ro" die when it would have to replay the journal
with a message that user must run fsck.ext3 in order to be able to mount
it albeit read-only? Still I would prefer having an extra switch to
force mount RO while not touching the journal for disk forensics.
I think that would also prevent the cases when a LiveCD/rescue distribution
would not mount+replay it automagically but user would really have to
provide the switch to the command. I am really not using the recovery
boot cd to touch my partitions in some cases unwillingly.

Sure that does not prevent my case when I let ext2 IFS writing onto
my ext3 partition. Actually, couldn't the driver at least warn me
the journal log is non-empty (am just a user, sorry, cannot check
myself the code at www.fs-driver.org if it could do at least this
although it does not understand ext3). ;-)

Martin