Subject: Formatting a 4GB Partition

From: Karsten Mueller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 12:48:47 +0000

Hello,

I tried to install Debian 1.1 on a 4GB Partition using the kernel 2.07
with NCR8010 Support. The disk is a Quantum Atlas.
After writing 255 inodes on disk the formatting stopped with
the message "Can't resolve symbol llseek".

Does anybody know if the formatting should work in general
and what goes wrong in this special case ?

It would be nice if could also you mail me directly because I could
only read possible answers in the maillist archive ...

bye, Karsten <[email-masked]>

---

From: Randy Gobbel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 11:19:30 -0700

>>>>> On Mon, 12 Aug 1996 12:48:47 +0000, Karsten Mueller <[email-masked]>
>>>>> said:

> the message "Can't resolve symbol llseek".

I also have a Quantum Atlas, and the same thing happened to me.  Apparently
some piece of software required to format beyond 255 inodes is not compiled
into the kernel on the boot floppy.  I worked around it as follows:

1.  Created a single 300MB partition, left everything beyond that partition as
    free space.

2.  Installed Linux on the existing partition, including /usr.

3.  Used my installed Linux to create a new partition and initialize the file
    system on the remaining disk space.

4.  Mounted the new partition on /mnt.

5.  Copied all of /usr over to the new partition, using cp -a.

6.  (IMPORTANT!) Checked to make sure that all /usr files were in their proper
    places in the new partition.

7.  Edited /etc/fstab to mount the new partition as /usr when the system
    starts up.

8.  Deleted all /usr files from the original partition with rm -r /usr.

9.  Created a new, empty /usr directory with mkdir /usr.

10. Unmounted the new partition and remounted it on /usr.

This worked the first time, and I've had no problems with the system since
then.

-Randy
-- 
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~gobbel/

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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 14:33:44 -0400 (EDT)

: 
: Hello,
: 
: I tried to install Debian 1.1 on a 4GB Partition using the kernel 2.07
: with NCR8010 Support. The disk is a Quantum Atlas.
: After writing 255 inodes on disk the formatting stopped with
: the message "Can't resolve symbol llseek".
: 
: Does anybody know if the formatting should work in general
: and what goes wrong in this special case ?
: 
: It would be nice if could also you mail me directly because I could
: only read possible answers in the maillist archive ...
: 
: bye, Karsten <[email-masked]>
: 

  I had the same problem with Conner 4207S and here's the reply from
  Ted when I asked the same question to him a while back.

> Sounds like an incompatibility between the libc used to compile mke2fs
> and the libc on your boot disk. If you recompile mke2fs, or upgrade
> the shared libraries on your system, this probably should go away.  

> What version of shared library are you using on your system?  llseek
> has been included in libc for quite a while....

  Does this mean Debian e2fsprogs-1.02-1 should be upgraded to 1.04
  or should be rebuilt at least with new libc5 ?

  At that time, my trick was using fdisk v2.1(>4GB) and mke2fs(v0.5b)
  under slackware-2.3 setup menu to successfully format 4gb single
  partition.

  Hope this helps,
  Joownoo

-- 
Joonwoo Nam
MAGNUMS(MAssachusetts Group for NUMerical analysis of Semiconductors)
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UMASS at Amherst
e-mail:[email-masked] / work:413-545-4762 / fax:413-545-4611
http://khushi.ecs.umass.edu/~nam