Re: Slow ADSL !

[Tobias Diedrich <ranma@example.com>]

Asa Liton wrote:

> At start up there war some thing like : Press Ctrl-D for blah
> blah...../ Run fsck manually etc. I don't know what this means and
> couldn't boot Linux. So I had to go for a new installation.

Jonathan Q already explained what to do, but I want to add
something:

As your kernel has ext3 filesystem support you might want to convert
your ext2 filesystem to ext3 (don't panic, this is really easy to do
^_^).
ext2 has been the linux filesystem for many years, but recently the
demand for a journalling filesystem has grown. Journalling filesystems
have the advantage of not requiring a filesystemcheck if your machine
crashed, which is both convenient for you and important for servers, as
a filesystemcheck can take a long time depending on the size of your
harddisk.
ext3 is really just ext2 with addon journalling, so it is backwards
compatible (you can mount an ext3 partition with an ext2-only kernel).

To convert your filesystem you have to do this:

Login as root.

Run "grep ext2 /etc/fstab", this should give you some output like this:

melchior:~# grep ext2 /etc/fstab
/dev/hda1	/		ext2	defaults			1	1
/dev/hdb1	/shared		ext2	defaults			1	1

Now for all listed partitions do "tune2fs -j <partition>", i.e. "tune2fs
-j /dev/hda1; tune2fs -j /dev/hdb1".
This will create a journal on your ext2 partitions.

The only thing left to do ist to change ext2 into ext3 in your
/etc/fstab. As I guess you won't feel comfortable with vi, do this:
sed -e 's/ext2/ext3/g' < /etc/fstab > /tmp/newfstab
mv /tmp/newfstab /etc/fstab

The sed command will replace all occurences of ext2 with ext3.

After the next reboot the kernel should mount your filesystems as ext3
and you probably won't have to do a fsck again ^_-

-- 
Tobias								PGP: 0x9AC7E0BC