vsbabu.org

Hat problems

My laptop had a partition with Mandrake Linux 10.1 installed on it. I recently downloaded Fedora Core 3 and installed it. Fedora is quite nice, but it made my Mandrake system unavailable.

First problem was an easy fix. For the second issue, I have a workaround I don’t like.

First problem was that Fedora tossed out my LILO boot manager and installed GRUB. GRUB didn’t recognize Mandrake partition. This was an easy fix. Just edit /etc/grub.conf to have additional lines like below.

title Mandrake 10.1
     root (hd0, 5)
     kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda6 acpi=on
     initrd /boot/initrd.img

Note that hda6 maps to (hd0, 5). If it was hda8, it would map to (hd0, 7).

Both filesystems are ext2 partitions.

/dev/hda6 - Mandrake 10.1 root
/dev/hda8 - Fedora Core 3 root
/dev/hda7 - /home

I am stumped at the second issue though. Mandrake stops at e2fsck while booting. It claims that filesystem has unsupported features and you need to get a new version of e2fsck.

Here’s my worklog on the issue so far.

• Login to Fedora as root.
• Make sure that /dev/hda6 is not mounted.
• /dev/hda6 now has acquired flags like dir_index, filetype, sparse_super and ext_attr. I don’t think dir_index and ext_attr are understood by Mandrake’s e2fsck.

  tune2fs -l /dev/hda6|grep features
  

  We need to remove the dir_index and ext_attr flags.

  Removing dir_index is easy.

  tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hda6
  

  tune2fs does not understand ext_attr yet. So use debugfs.

  debugfs -w /dev/hda6 -R "features ^ext_attr"
  

  Run filesystem check.

  e2fsck -y -f /dev/hda6
  

  Now, after a reboot, fsck still complains about things it can't understand.

• One quick solution is to reboot like

  shutdown -r -f now
  

  Or equivalently, change the bootloader to have a fastboot option while loading the kernel.

  This will skip fsck check. All it does is make an empty flag file at /fastboot.

  I don’t like this, but it lets me login to Mandrake 10.1.

  For disk sanity checks, I periodically do e2fsck on all disks when I am logged on to Fedora.