I have a Thinkpad T40, on which I run RUNT (http://ncsu.edu/resnet/runt/ ,
based on Slackware).  In /etc/rc.d/rc.6, it does "umount -a -r -t nonfs",
which never completes.  I did some investigating, and /proc/mounts is a soft
link to /proc/self/mounts, and reading /proc/mounts hangs at all times.  It
hangs so that even ^C won't kill it.  This means that it can't ever shut
down poroperly -- I always have to turn the machine off -- and consequently
the file system (ext2) frequently gets damaged.  What can I do?

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-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
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Hactar wrote:

> What�can�I�do?

.... what if you remove the "-r" switch?
..
-- 
<<   http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/   >>
[Babe] Ruth made a big mistake when he gave up pitching.
                -- Tris Speaker, 1921

In article <%LoEc.5537$lh4.2080@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
mjt  <mjtobler@removethis_mail.ru> wrote:
> Hactar wrote:
> 
> > What can I do?
> 
> ... what if you remove the "-r" switch?

(What's that weird 0x7c thing that was between my quoted words [until I
replaced it]?)

"-r" means "In case unmounting fails, try to remount read-only".  Any
attempt to read /proc/mounts, whether by "cat /proc/mounts" or "grep -v
' nfs ' /proc/mounts" or "umount -a" hangs forever.  I contacted the
maintainer, and he said he's not sure why it happens, but it happens on his
T40 also.  A workaround is to use alternate boot media.

I'm not sure how much "booting" is required.  I made a lilo floppy, and I
thought that worked, but now I'm not sure.  The kernel just barely fits on
a floppy (13xx Kb), so I'm either going to compile a new kernel for it,
or replicate the laptop's boot environment and make a lilo+kernel floppy,
once I find a floppy without bad blocks.

On the other hand, does anyone know a distro/tool that can resize XP NTFS?
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html _might_ work, but it has
scary warnings.  The only reason I had a tiny, run-from-USB distro was to
verify that the tools at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/ can be made to work.
There are packages and source there, and I have strong evidence from
http://students.washington.edu/djwatson/thinkpadt41.html that this NIC can
be made to work with that driver.

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Hactar wrote:

> On the other hand, does anyone know a distro/tool that can resize XP NTFS?

.... i've used suse 9.1, xandros 2.0, mandrake 10, and
they all will resize ntfs
..
-- 
<<   http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/   >>
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man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
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In article <RaKEc.752$R36.544@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
mjt  <mjtobler@removethis_mail.ru> wrote:
> Hactar wrote:
> 
> > On the other hand, does anyone know a distro/tool that can resize XP NTFS?
> 
> ... i've used suse 9.1, xandros 2.0, mandrake 10, and
> they all will resize ntfs

Cool, I have Xandros 2.  I may bite the bullet and put Linux on there.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

      rm -f /bin/laden 

ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge (Hactar) wrote in message 
> On the other hand, does anyone know a distro/tool that can resize XP NTFS?
> http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html _might_ work, but it has
> scary warnings.  

Ntfsresize works fine. The warnings are that don't use Parted and be
careful when using fdisk. Parted isn't maintained properly for a long
time and the 2.6 kernel changes broke it badly.

Resizing a filesystem on a partition consists of two completely
independent steps: you must resize the filesystem and you must resize
the partition too. NTFS resizing is very safe (you can't make mistakes
because ntfsresize prevents it) but the partitioning part is
error-prone because it's easy to make typos and Parted has bugs that
you can hit.

If you messed up the partitioning part then you can most of the time
fix it, especially if you saved your original partition table.

In other words, unless you use the wrong disk partitioner and you're
unlucky, or you type wrong values, commands for the partitioner then
ntfs resizing works perfectly without data loss or boot problems.

In article <204f0b87.0407010441.3882a814@posting.google.com>,
Sz. Csetey <szcs@abuse.co.uk> wrote:
> ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge (Hactar) wrote in message 
> > On the other hand, does anyone know a distro/tool that can resize XP NTFS?
> > http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html _might_ work, but it has
> > scary warnings.  
> 
> Ntfsresize works fine. The warnings are that don't use Parted and be
> careful when using fdisk. Parted isn't maintained properly for a long
> time and the 2.6 kernel changes broke it badly.
> 
> Resizing a filesystem on a partition consists of two completely
> independent steps: you must resize the filesystem and you must resize
> the partition too. NTFS resizing is very safe (you can't make mistakes
> because ntfsresize prevents it) but the partitioning part is
> error-prone because it's easy to make typos and Parted has bugs that
> you can hit.
> 
> If you messed up the partitioning part then you can most of the time
> fix it, especially if you saved your original partition table.
> 
> In other words, unless you use the wrong disk partitioner and you're
> unlucky, or you type wrong values, commands for the partitioner then
> ntfs resizing works perfectly without data loss or boot problems.

Before I do anything, I'm backing up the hard drive over 100Mb/s ethernet
(ssh user@host "/export/bin/bzip -9 > /scratch/hda.bz2" < /dev/hda) so if it
doesn't work or I screw up, I can just write the file back to the hard
drive, and be right back where I was.  It's taking a looong time.  It would
be faster if I skipped the "bzip" step, but I don't have the room for that;
much less the room to compress it once it's here.

Anyhow, my hard drive looks something like this:

[*****************-------------------------------***---------------------]

(where "*" is where files are and "-" is where files aren't)

There's enough free space, if all put together, to shrink that to half its
current size.  I optimized the hard drive using "Disk Optimizer" (or
whatever the default program under XP is called), and it indicated that the
outlier is not "unmovable".  Should ntfsresize move that, or do I need to
find a different optimizer?

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
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