Trouble attempting to migrate to different filesystem

incgnito

Alright I've been looking online into various filesystems and Reiser4 looked pretty promising, so I decided to try and give it a shot, however I've run into a problem I'm not quite sure how to get around. I figured I'd tell you guys what I did and maybe someone here could tell me what I missed.

I started out with an already working Gentoo 2007.0 AMD64 setup -- uvesafb, kde 3.5, etc. -- and manually patched gentoo-sources-2.6.23-r9 for reiser4 (and of course rebuilt, rebooted, etc.). Next I formatted one of my partitions for Reiser4 (using "mkfs.reiser4 -o create=ccreg40,compress=gzip1 /dev/sdc3" (also using an EXT3 /dev/sdc1 for /boot)), copied what I had on my main partition over to the Reiser4 partition (first using tar, then once I ran into trouble I started over and used cp -ax), modified the /etc/fstab on the new partition, made a new grub entry to boot to the new partition, rebooted and it appeared I had a working setup -- until I tried to run any program, that is. Any attempt to run emerge, startx, etc. just resulted in the machine giving me a ">>>" prompt on the next line, like it was waiting for some more input I was unaware of.

Okay, so maybe I screwed up somewhere copying over the files from one partition to the other. So as I mentioned earlier I started over, wiped that partition, and copied the files over using a different method as explained in a mini-HOWTO -- no luck; same problem. Fine. So I wiped the partition again and this time I would just build from scratch on that partition. I did your average Gentoo installation stuff (mounting the partition, untar'ing the stage3 tarball, mounting proc and dev, chrooting, etc.) and started with the steps after chrooting -- "source /etc/profile" seemed to work, but "env-update" ended up with the same ">>>" prompt as before.

So for the moment the Reiser4 partition is wiped and empty, and I'm at a loss. Any ideas?

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject:

My first thought reading your post is wondering if you edited /etc/fstab to take into account the fact that you moved your install from one drive to the next.

When you move your install from one drive to another, you have to update /etc/fstab so it can find and mount your drives. I moved my installation on my server from an older, slower PATA drive to a newer, faster SATA drive. I had to edit fstab to take into account the fact that my root drive had turned from /dev/hdb2 to /dev/sda2. I also had to edit my /etc/lilo.conf as well to make the change complete.

That was about two months ago, and the system in question has been through an emerge --emptytree system and emerge --emptytree world. It also continues to run, day and night, with nary a glitch.

An improper /etc/fstab may or may not be your problem, but it can't hurt to double-check that particular small but incredibly important detail. According to the uptime part of conky, the system I did the switch on has been up for 10 days, 8 hours, and 40 minutes. It would be longer, but I had to do some work on the Windoze side.

Hope that helps.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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incgnito · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:44 pm Post subject:

Yeah I edited /etc/fstab to reflect the change from /dev/sdd2 to /dev/sdc3. Thing is even if that might have been wrong, to me it still doesn't explain why the same problem would come up when chrooting to an entirely new environment with a freshly unpacked stage3 tarball, which doesn't even need an fstab until later in the installation.

Thanks for trying, though

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:13 am Post subject:

Bummer. The only other idea I have is to double check your kernel settings. Other than that, I'm not quite sure.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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dusanc · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 248 Location: Serbia

I did these steps to migrate to another HDD just yesterday:
1. made a reiser4 partition for my new / : mkfs.reiser4 -o create=ccreg40,compress=lzo1 /dev/sda3
2. copied the partition which I mounted on /6: tar -cpf - * | tar -C /6 -xvpf -
3. Used reiser4 patch from here: http://chichkin_i.zelnet.ru/namesys/reiser4-for-2.6.23-3.patch.gz
Everything done using SysRescueCD 1.0
There were some problems that you describe with earlier patches for 2.6.23, this one is fixed, and official stable one.
Oh and there are very small, or no gains using gzip over LZO and pretty much higher CPU requirements.

incgnito · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 6:15 pm Post subject:

I'll have to check that out over the weekend; thanks!

dusanc · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 248 Location: Serbia

I found a thread where it's reported first (the >>> bug)
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4545941.html#4545941