On Mon, 8 Oct 2001 19:16:56 +0200
Cliff Sarginson
I just had a look at this out of curiosity. I have a 40GB disk with reiserfs partitions I created at install time, plus one ext2 file system I created later. This still left some free space over. Under both 2.4.4 and 2.4.10 fdisk cannot see this free space. I really cannot remember but I think I created the ext2 partition under Slackware and kernel 2.2.19.
Now here is the interesting part. "cfdisk" does see the free space and will let me create new file systems. What does this mean ? A bug in fdisk probably. I notice that fdisk and cfdisk show partition information in a different order. I have a primary partition /dev/hda4 at the physical end of my disk for FreeBSD, my extended partition precedes it. It is possible that this confuses fdisk but not cfdisk.
I would regard this as a very nasty bug. If the partition manipulation program does not work properly then it tends to diminish one's confidence in it !
-- Hi Cliff,
After posting my message I tried booting this machine using the 2.2.16 kernel on the 7.0 CD. I was able to make filesystems and change flags just as I did on the spare machine. I therefore reported the problem as a possible bug in 2.4.10 to the kernel.org list and Alan Cox has replied to the list (and me) as follows : "Obvious one to check would be to see if when 2.4.10 acquired the page cach changes someone backed out the device picks up underlying file size limit bug fix that the -ac tree has and went to Linus. It really sounds like that happened." If this is the cause, then I guess it may have other ramifications. am not subscribed to the kernel list, so I am dependent on being copied in on replies or reading the thread on the archive as (and if) it develops. Regards, Geoff _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com