Problem:
Another thing which went wrong porting my Debian etch installation to a VirtualBox image is grub not handling 256 byte inode size of ext3 filesystems. I used a Debian lenny ISO to partition the virtual HDD, so per default it was created with an inode size of 256 bytes. Then I dumped the data. Previously, Debian etch used standard 128 byte inode size. I noticed this when booting the ported image:
Searching for GRUB installation directory … found: /boot/grub
The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.
Solution:
This is a known bug in older Debian installations. grub 0.97 cannot support inode sizes greater than 256 bytes. So I had to either recreate the partition with proper settings or update grub. I ended up with upgrading Debian to lenny, and everything is working smoothly, at least for a while.
Hi,
Primary, I’m not an english speaker :-) , I’ve got the same problem, and the issue was like you.
But since I moved from etch to lenny, I can’t use Ghost V11 anymore, because of inode size. He say “up to 128″…my solution is to install debian in 256, create directory ( / /home /var …etc), use mk2fs.ext -I 128 /var2 or something like that, move the content of var to var2, and edit fstab, reboot. Ok, I’ve my system with inode=128, but it’s such a bloody long way! How can I do it faster?
When I launch partman in debian-installer, I create /boot with inode of 128, automaticaly…Do you know how can I did it with others partitions? At install time?
Thanks in advance.
PS: Sorry for my english ^^
According to Frans Pop you could try this:
“The “fix” I have is ATM to execute the following command (in the D-I
environment) before the start of partitioning:
sed -ir “s/(inode_size =) 256/\1 128/” /etc/mke2fs.conf
This works with the current conf file, but if needed I could make that a bit
more generic, for example:
sed -ir “s/(inode_size =) .*/\1 128/g” /etc/mke2fs.conf“.
I didn’t test it, so I’m not sure how well it works.