On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 at 2:11pm, Florin Andrei wrote > Joshua Baker-LePain wrote: >> On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 at 2:41pm, Mark Hull-Richter wrote >> >>> What is the best way to accomplish step two of this - reformatting the >>> partition? I've only done this so far during the installation phase, >>> and that was for partitions I knew I could destroy with impunity. I'm >>> guessing I unmount the drive, <do something magic here> and remount it. >>> It's the magic part I don't know. >> >> 'man mke2fs' has all the details. I usually do: >> >> mke2fs -b 4096 -j -m 1 -O dir_index $DEVICE > > What are the parameters used by the installer to format a partition? > I believe it's simply "mke2fs -j $DEVICE" but I may be wrong. Have a look with tune2fs (see below). Default mke2fs behavior (on centos4 at least) does *not* turn on dir_index, thus why I included it above. Also, mke2fs defaults to having the new filesystem checked every so many days or mounts, which anaconda turns off. So a mke2fs should be followed by: tune2fs -c0 -i0 $DEVICE [jlb at chaos ~]$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/hda1 tune2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004) Filesystem volume name: /1 Last mounted on: <not available> Filesystem UUID: 5679b769-446c-48f4-aea9-a72cfe61f38a Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53 Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic) Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file Default mount options: (none) Filesystem state: clean Errors behavior: Continue Filesystem OS type: Linux Inode count: 1048576 Block count: 2096474 Reserved block count: 104823 Free blocks: 969847 Free inodes: 889498 First block: 0 Block size: 4096 Fragment size: 4096 Reserved GDT blocks: 511 Blocks per group: 32768 Fragments per group: 32768 Inodes per group: 16384 Inode blocks per group: 512 Filesystem created: Thu Sep 22 03:59:32 2005 Last mount time: Thu Feb 8 12:36:33 2007 Last write time: Thu Feb 8 12:36:33 2007 Mount count: 29 Maximum mount count: -1 Last checked: Thu Sep 22 03:59:32 2005 Check interval: 0 (<none>) Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user root) Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group root) First inode: 11 Inode size: 128 Journal inode: 8 First orphan inode: 776382 Default directory hash: tea Directory Hash Seed: 1c2cefd8-ed4a-49f0-9048-1de30d1ac4b6 Journal backup: inode blocks -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University