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Re: dosfslabel finds problem, e2fsck does not



On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:25:42 -0400, Thomas H. George wrote:
> My system, Squeeze, cannot install the latest kernel image because
> dosfslabel finds a problem that prevents the installation of linux-base.
> 
> Trying to resolve this I used e2fsck to check each of the disk
> partitions and e2fsck reported all the partitions clean.  However, the
> result of running dosfslabel /dev/hda1 results in the following output:
> 
> 
> There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
> Differences: (offset:original/backup)
>   0:eb/01, 1:58/00, 2:90/04, 4:53/02, 5:57/00, 6:49/04, 7:4e/00, 8:34/0c
>   , 9:2e/00, 10:31/04, 12:02/ff, 13:08/1d, 14:20/f8, 15:00/0f, 16:02/00
>   .
>   .
>   .
>   , 493:00/1d, 494:00/f8, 495:00/0f
>   Not automatically fixing this.
> NO NAME    
> 
> This hard drive used to have windoze installed and could be booted.  The
> windoze partition was reformated to be an ext2 partition.
> 
> Could it be that there is still a windoze mbr before the /dev/hda1
> partition and fsdoslabel sees this but e2fsck does not?
> 
> If so, what can I do about it?

The first thing I would do is to check for signatures of other
filesystems that were left behind on /dev/hda1:

  wipefs /dev/hda1

This command has to be run as root or as a user who is member of the
"disk" group. Without options it will just list all the filesystem
signatures that it can find; as its name indicates, it can then be used
to remove the spurious signatures. (As always, see the manpage and be
careful what you type; wipefs is part of util-linux.)

I recently had the automatic conversion to UUIDs fail on a system
because the root partition had residual signatures of dos filesystems,
which causes blkid to fail for that partition, meaning it cannot be
found by UUID or LABEL during boot.

In your case I would guess that a residual dos signature causes the
postinst to run dosfslabel, which fails because there is now an ext3 on
the partition.

-- 
Regards,            |
          Florian   |


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