Forum:Formatting Drive with Ext3 fiesystem

Has anyone successfully reformatted the Screenplay HD Pro NTFS partition with the Ext3 file system? My unsuccessful attempts are as follows: 1) The mke2fs command seems to require lots of memory to format a 1 TB partition. So it failed via telnet on the SPP. It also failed via USB to a Linux desktop. I was successful running without KDE or Gnome; using a Gnome terminal session or adding Single to the kernel command line in GRUB. 2) While the Ext3 partition seem to have worked on the first boot, it hasn't worked since. It appeared to fix the problem of crashing while recording and corruping files and file systems. 3) When the 1TB Ext3 partition fails to mount files will be recorded onto one of the much smaller partitions. If you later suceed n mounting the 1TB partition in its normal directory position it will hide the files recorded while the partition was unmounted. 4) There seems to be two ways to mount the 1TB partition: the /etc/fstab configuration file or the /init.d/rcS1 script. The manual command, mount -t ext3 /dev/hda4 /usr/local/etc/dvdplayer/hdd/volumes/HDD1 gives an error of failed: Invalid Argument. The original fstab file does not include any of the disk partitions. a) I added the following line to the end of /etc/fstab: /dev/hda4 /usr/local/etc/dvdplayer/hdd/volumes/HDD1 ext3 0 0 This allowed a command of mount -t ext3 /usr/local/etc/dvdplayer/hdd/volumes/HDD1 to work, but its not working now. b) The /etc/init.d/rcS1 startup file seems to have bugs in the the mount pathnames. The directory dvdplayer is missing from the mount commands in /etc/init.d/rcS1 script. Even when the 1TB partition is mounted successfully via telnet, it doesn't affect the Samba file sharing or the remote user interface. I assume this is because the partition is mounted after the server software is started.

Something is missing in my analysis, since it fails to show how the system would work even with the original NTFS partition. The NTFS partition is not included in the /etc/fstab file and the mount -t ntfs command in /etc/init.d/rcS1 references a nonexistent mount point. GregLawson 21:29, 4 March 2009 (UTC)GregLawson
 * Mine is currently formatted for ext3. I used mkfs.ext2 -j /dev/hda4 to format it (yes, I could use mkfs.ext3, but old habits die hard sometimes) and aside from it taking a long time on the ScreenPlay Pro HD, I didn't have any problems with it.  I've done that multiple times.  I have never had it not mount.  I did not have to make any changes to the fstab or rcS1 files.  As for the rcS1 not needing the dvdplayer directory to mount... if you look at /usr/local/etc/hdd/volumes, you'll find that is a linked directory.  That's how come it can do it without. --JCoug 00:50, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. I had not used the -j flag on the mke2fs command, so I had an ext2 not an ext3 filesystem. I didn't expect it to make much difference for testng purposes, but we live and learn. I was able to add the ext3 journal file without reformatting by running the tune2fs -j /dev/sda4 command. Mounts nicely now. GregLawson 21:29, 4 March 2009 (UTC)GregLawson