chitgoks wrote:
hi , our centos os has an ext3 file system. and i cant create any more directories, it gives me a too many links error, even when doing a manual mkdir.
is there any workaround for this? without changing it to a different file system like reiserFS? we dont have a reiserfs module in the os so it will have to be installed. and can it be possible to install a reiserFS without having to reformat the os? just mount it after installing? please advise
The issue is the link count in the inode for the parent directory. Each subdirectory has a ".." link that points back to the parent, and the maximum link count for an inode in an EXT2 or EXT3 filesystem is 32000. A directory begins life with a link count of 2, so there is a hard limit of 31998 subdirectories.
The limit for reiserfs is larger (max unsigned integer - 1000), so that would avoid the problem. Yes, you can certainly create a reiserfs filesystem and mount it without having to reformat other filesystems on your machine. You will lose whatever data was on the partition that you reformat.