[Parted-maintainers] Bug#579948: SunBlade 1000 installation report - fails to mount root partition on /target

[Frans Pop]

reassign 579948 libparted0debian1 2.2-5
tags 579948 d-i
affects 579948 partman-base
thanks

On Sunday 02 May 2010, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 03:57:48PM +0100, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> ~ # fdisk -l /dev/sdb
>
> Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8864 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
>    Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdb1             0        13     97280    1  Boot
> /dev/sdb2          2048      2049      1024   83  Linux native
> /dev/sdb3             0      8864  71200080    5  Whole disk
> /dev/sdb4          4096      4097      1024   82  Linux swap
> /dev/sdb5          6144      8864  21848064   83  Linux native

Right. So the free space shown in partman *is* really there (although it
shouldn't be). And sdb2 is completely wrong as it's way too small for a
root fs.

I think this may be the result of new partition alignment code in parted.
The error is certainly in libparted as the log shows the following.

Creation of first partition (100MB for /boot; looks OK):
/bin/perform_recipe: IN: NEW_PARTITION =dev=sdb primary ext2
                         0-72908881919 beginning 100000001
parted_server: OUT: 1	0-99614719	99614720	primary	ext2	/dev/sdb1

Creation of second partition (7GB for /):
/bin/perform_recipe: IN: NEW_PARTITION =dev=sdb primary ext3
                         99614720-72908881919 beginning 7000000001
parted_server: OUT: 2	16845373440-16846422015	1048576	primary	ext3	/dev/sdb2

So partman requests a partition of 7GB, but libparted creates one of
1MB. Looks broken to me.

The swap partition has the same problem: partman requests ~2GB, but we
get only 1MB.

> Here's the fdisk output and illustration of the mounting error:
>
> ~ # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb2 /target/
> mount: mounting /dev/sdb2 on /target/ failed: Invalid argument

This is a consequence of the error above. The syslog shows:
May  2 17:12:42 partman: mke2fs 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
May  2 17:12:42 partman: Filesystem too small for a journal

So, the FS is too small for a journal and therefore not a valid ext3
filesystem. But apparently ext4 is able to mount it (and you should
also be able to mount it as ext2).