[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Problem with Knoppix 6.2 18-11-2009's 0wn



Hi Marcos,

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 10:59:21PM +0000, Marcos Torres Marado wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> The HDD install of the latest version of Knoppix wasn't working for me: my scenario was 
> a "I want to create the partitions myself and then you'll see I have what's needed to 
> install". Besides many other partitions, I created (with gparted) a swap and a free (and 
> big enough) reiserfs partition. Yet, 0wn (the installer) kept telling me I didn't have what 
> is needed to make an installation. Checking the logs, I found out that there was a "mount" 
> failing. After looking at the code, I found out that it was happening (in my case) twice 
> in the code. Here's how I've fixed it (sorry for not providing a diff):
> 
> at /usr/share/0wn/0wn-partitioning :
> 
> 1) on check_partition_empty(), change 
> - blockdev --setro "$1"
> to
> + blockdev --setrw "$1" 
> 
> 2) on check_partition_big_enough(), change 
> - blockdev --setro "$1"
> to
> + blockdev --setrw "$1" 
> 
> I'm confident that this is *not* the right way to fix the problem, but it surely was 
> how I worked around the issue and now have a machine with Knoppix being 
> installed :-)

Your fix is OK, you could also just have removed the blockdev line(s)
completely.

The real problem here is that after partitioning and formatting,
reiserfs needs to be mounted rw at least ONCE for creating the journal,
thus making it a valid reiserfs filesystem. gparted does not do this on
its own. Mounting reiserfs with the device set read-only is impossible
if the filesystem was never initialized properly. Reiserfs "repairs"
itself to a consistent state during mount without needing fsck, but this
does not work if the underlying device is read-only.

The blockdev commands are there primarily to make sure that filesystems
are never changed during the test-only phase, which is especially
important if the OS running before you started Knoppix was shut down to
hibernate, and the filesystems are in an inconsistent state. But
actually, this is over-cautious, since no other utility (especially the
filemanager) really checks for that.

> PS -> any follow-ups, please include me in CC, since I'm not subscribed to this 
>         mailing list

Done.

Regards
-Klaus


Reply to: