[PLUG] Does your favorite rescue CD recognize your current filesystemm?

[Carlos Konstanski]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:52:53 -0800
> From: John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>
> Reply-To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> To: PLUG <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] Does your favorite rescue CD recognize your current	filesystem?
> 
> I have been using Fedora 11, x86_64 for about a month now. It just
> occurred to me to check what fileystem Fedora installed. I recall
> during the installation I told it to use the entire hard disk and just
> clicked OK on the defaults. Turns out that it created a 200 MB ext3
> boot partition and a logical volume of 297 GB which contains an ext4
> root partition and a small swap partition.
>
> I have several rescue CDs, from Knoppix to smaller command line only
> disks. Guess what? They're all too old to be able to fix an ext4
> filesystem. My very, very dim understanding is that older systems
> (with ext3) can read/write to an ext4 filesystem, but the older e2fsck
> won't work. I may well be wrong about the read/write - that is, I may
> have it backwards.
>
> Fedora started using ext4 with Fedora 10. Ubuntu made it optional with
> Jaunty, and Karmic uses it exclusively.
>
> It's Clinic Eve, so I am downloading some more recent rescue CDs. At
> the Clinic tomorrow I will boot them and see which ones can deal with
> my ext4 root partition.

ext4 is a stopgap version of ext. It adds some features that are on
the roadmap for btrfs. It figures that Fedora would be all over ext4,
even though it isn't really even intended to last once btrfs comes
out. If I were in your shoes, I would avoid it.

Carlos