Going 4K - SOLVED (for now)

Message

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 9:55 am

With the release of 2.6.12, my sweet old 2.6.11-love2 has been deprecated

. I've decided to switch to 2.6.12, and go fully 4K stacks in the process. Now, the problem is that I have a root partition with reiser4... that's going to have to become ext3 I guess. The only way to do it, I've been told, is to copy the data somewhere, kill the partition, make a new etx3 partition, and copy back.

Sounds too simple though. What about virtual filesystems (e.g. /proc), permissions and the like? What commands should I use to do the copying? I'd go with something like "tar -cpf blah.tar /", remove reiser4, create ext3, "tar -xpf blah.tar /". Will that work?

bonbons · Post by **bonbons** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 10:10 am

If you have space enough, I would just create the new ext3 partition, mount --bind / somewhere else (so you don't need to worry about all other filesystems mounted on your /)

The cp -a /mnt/rootbind /mnt/newroot

As a final step, you will need to adjust your bootloader in new root fs.

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 10:34 am

I don't have that much space. I have some free space which is on another ext3 partition (where I keep my data), so I was thinking to tar / up and put that on the ext3, and then restore.

Does tar have anything equivalent to cp's -a option?

bonbons · Post by **bonbons** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 10:43 am

Godji wrote:I don't have that much space. I have some free space which is on another ext3 partition (where I keep my data), so I was thinking to tar / up and put that on the ext3, and then restore.

Does tar have anything equivalent to cp's -a option?

Tar does it automatically, but you need to use the mount --bind trick as I'm not sure it is able to ignore mounts... (nota that cp's -a option does not take care of mounts either)
cp -a and tar will preserver ownership, device files and everything. (if you run from a livecd then you probably don't have to worry about the mounts, but on running system you have to)

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 3:48 pm

I tried tar, but it had some sort of problem (started giving stat errors after a while). So I ended up using cp, and it copied everything except hidden files (such as .bash_profile). How can I make cp do that? I couldn't find it the man page.

bonbons · Post by **bonbons** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 3:54 pm

Godji wrote:I tried tar, but it had some sort of problem (started giving stat errors after a while). So I ended up using cp, and it copied everything except hidden files (such as .bash_profile). How can I make cp do that? I couldn't find it the man page.

cp does copy them if they are in sub-directories or on the command line.

For what files did tar complain?

FGA · Post by **FGA** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:04 pm

bonbons wrote:
Godji wrote:I don't have that much space. I have some free space which is on another ext3 partition (where I keep my data), so I was thinking to tar / up and put that on the ext3, and then restore.

Does tar have anything equivalent to cp's -a option?
Tar does it automatically, but you need to use the mount --bind trick as I'm not sure it is able to ignore mounts... (nota that cp's -a option does not take care of mounts either)
cp -a and tar will preserver ownership, device files and everything. (if you run from a livecd then you probably don't have to worry about the mounts, but on running system you have to)

Does ls's and tar's "--one-file-system" option do the same as the "mount --bind" trick?

EDIT: does the nvidia binary module work with 4k stacks?

bonbons · Post by **bonbons** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:13 pm

FGA wrote:Does ls's and tar's "--one-file-system" option do the same as the "mount --bind" trick?

Yes, but with a small exception, you won't get files in folders with something mounted above them (e.g. boot-time devices under /dev/ where udev or devfs is mounted later during boot-time) So mount --bind still has a small advantage...

e.g. if you use udev and tar --one-file-system your root, then you will miss /dev/null and such that are present on root partition for very beginning of boot process

FGA wrote:EDIT: does the nvidia binary module work with 4k stacks?

If I remeber well recent versions should be 4k Stack compatible... just read the README that comes with the driver package

frenkel · Post by **frenkel** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:44 pm

Godji wrote:I tried tar, but it had some sort of problem (started giving stat errors after a while). So I ended up using cp, and it copied everything except hidden files (such as .bash_profile). How can I make cp do that? I couldn't find it the man page.

First thing: don't try it on a "running" system. Boot with a livecd and mount your hd's (not /sys, /proc or /dev).
Then run the following command: tar -cjvpf backup.tar.bz2 /mnt/gentoo
This will backup everything in the map /mnt/gentoo, with bz2 compression and preserving permissions. Extract it like this:
tar -xjvpf /mnt/backup/backup.tar.bz2

Good luck,
Frank

grenouille · Post by **grenouille** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 12:58 am

erm, if you do that from a live cd, you can do it with cp -a
no need for tar or compression

I did it a few times to test filesystems and never had any problem

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 8:15 am

So I did it with tar and bzip compression:

Code: Select all

tar -cjvpf /mnt/data/root.tar -C /mnt/root .
...
tar -xjvpf /mnt/data/root.tar -C /mnt/root

It worked, but my system has some problems now. When it boots, it gives me some messages, such as:

Code: Select all

Skipping /var/run/utmp initialization (ro root?)

and

Code: Select all

Skipping /var and /tmp initialization (ro root?)

and

Code: Select all

No automount maps defined

and

Code: Select all

Error initializing random number generator

Although I had kdm start at boot, now it won't, althogh startx then works. Many executables would not run (they print a blank line and hang), but I fixed that with giving /var and /tmp recursively full permissions. I also tried deleting those folders. In the syslog, it says that many apps can't create/lock pid files.
What's going on?

frenkel · Post by **frenkel** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 9:58 am

Are you sure you used the p option? I had the same problem when I forgot to preserve permissions. Never had any problems when I used -p though...

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 10:12 am

I'm sure I used it both during compression and extraction. I did delete the /tmp and the /var/tmp folder before starting, as well as /usr/portage/distfiles, in order to conserve disk space and time. But the damage is already done, and I want to avoid reinstalling Gentoo (think KDE...)

frenkel · Post by **frenkel** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 3:29 pm

Try this:

Code: Select all

# rm -rf /tmp
# mkdir /tmp
# chmod 1777 /tmp
# chown root:root /tmp
# chown root:root /var

This will hopefully solve some stuff, but not everything I guess. Can you give us the output of "ls -al /" and "ls -al /var"

Frank

Guinpen · Post by **Guinpen** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 6:46 pm

I'd love to, but I just decided to reformat and reinstall. I'm currently bootstrapping

Yeah I know it's a Windows habit, but I did use it a lot before I switched to Gentoo.

Thanks for your help.