[PLUG] Format?

[Elliott Mitchell]

>From: "John Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net>
> When I tried it (with Dump) it got 4 Gb written and then the terminal 
> window gave me an error message that the file was too big. Of 
> course, silly me. When I checked, the drive had been pre-formatted 
> at the factory with Fat32. 

Apparently the size limitation for ext2 is 2GB.  :-/

You want the -B and -M options for `dump`. These will cause `dump` to
write a series of files, rather than trying to dump everything into one
giant file.

Sample usage might be:

dump -f root.dump-20051208. -B 1048576 -M -j /dev/hda1

Which would produce a series of 1GB bzip-compressed files named
"root.dump-20051208.001", "root.dump-20051208.002", etc. Thus bypassing
any filesystem size limitations.



As for placing an ext2/3 filesystem on a device, `mkfs`. And as has been
mentioned, MAKE SURE IT ISN'T MOUNTED. At best if you forget this, the
disk will end up with a messed up filesystem. At worst you'll end up with
a screwed up filesystem, and your system will reboot (or worse, *won't*
reboot) because you confused the kernel.

As to the step involved, `fdisk` is optional. You could simply do
`mkfs -t ext2 -T largefile /dev/sda1`. The mismatch from the partition
table may confuse some utilities, or other OSes that expect the type in
the partition table to be accurate though.

Even better, if you're only placing on giant filesystem on it, you could
simply do `mkfs -t ext2 -T largefile /dev/sda`. The -T largefile tells
it to create fewer i-nodes, saves some space by limiting the maximum
number of possible files. Given that you're planning to use this for
backups, for which 256MB is *small*, this is appropriate.


>From: "John Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net>
> OK, thanks to you and Alan. But I just got a notice that PDXLUG is 
> having their meeting tonight at the Fireside. I usually go to those 
> anyway. I'll just haul the stuff down there and surely someone can 
> teach me how to do this.

They'll show you the steps we're talking about. This is safer as you'll
have someone to make sure you don't mess this up (these tools can do
severe damage if used correctly).


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