Arch Linux

Schirase

Member

Registered: 2010-02-14

Posts: 6

cfdisk fatal error and strange output of df

I got to install Arch and I am using it without a major problems, but few things still bugs me. My fstab looks something like that:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>                           <dir>      <type>   <options>            <dump> <pass>
devpts                                    /dev/pts   devpts   defaults              0      0
shm                                       /dev/shm   tmpfs    nodev,nosuid          0      0

/dev/cdrom                                /media/cd  auto     ro,user,noauto,unhide 0      0
/dev/dvd                                  /media/dvd auto     ro,user,noauto,unhide 0      0
#/dev/fd0                                  /media/fl  auto     user,noauto           0      0

UUID=7a6e9456-69d4-4346-bf4d-803e5f61f100 /          ext3     defaults,noatime      0      1 #/dev/hda5
UUID=bf4e4d66-2658-4e39-b1f8-b84cc157ba72 /boot      ext2     defaults              0      2 #/dev/hda6
UUID=d3a5e92f-454e-47f9-8bfa-86804a322e55 /tmp       reiserfs defaults,notail       0      2 #/dev/hda7
UUID=5333292d-4f3d-45a9-aa44-9df8c930244b /usr       reiserfs defaults,notail       0      2 #/dev/hda8
UUID=bb25bd08-eeaa-4732-93a6-87e238c06029 /var       reiserfs defaults,notail       0      2 #/dev/hda9
UUID=38298476-ea3d-4d15-a5d2-8c221a20ebe8 swap       swap     defaults              0      0 #/dev/hda10
UUID=de1d9d94-09ef-4429-b63e-fddea5e81195 /home      ext3     defaults,noatime      0      2 #/dev/hdb1

and as far as I know it is correct and everything works, but when I do df -h the output is:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                   10M  208K  9.8M   3% /dev
/dev/disk/by-uuid/7a6e9456-69d4-4346-bf4d-803e5f61f100
                      4.7G  262M  4.3G   6% /
shm                   250M     0  250M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6             962M   14M  899M   2% /boot
/dev/sda7             1.1G   33M  1.1G   4% /tmp
/dev/sda8             4.8G  944M  3.9G  20% /usr
/dev/sda9             7.7G  387M  7.3G   5% /var
/dev/sdb1              74G   27G   44G  39% /home

I wouldn't call it very clean. As you can see in fstab, disk with UUID 7a6e9456-69d4-4346-bf4d-803e5f61f100 is nothing else than /dev/sda5, my / partition, but it is labeled differently than other ones, with UUID instead of its /dev/* adress. In search for some major screw-up I tried to execute cfdisk to check my partition table one more time, but I got:

FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk

on both of my physical disks, which scared me a little.
I also noticed informations such as:

sda: p10 size 1999809 exceeds device capacity, limited to end of disk

in dmesg.log and other places regarding my / and /home partitions, and mentions of ext2 filesystem relating to them, when they are clearly ext3. I don't know why is it working that way and what I did wrong.

lagagnon

Member

From: an Island in the Pacific...

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 1,087

Website

Re: cfdisk fatal error and strange output of df

What command did you use to execute cfdisk? Try: "cfdisk /dev/sda". Also, show us the output of the command "free" so we can see how big your swap is.

---

Philosophy is looking for a black cat in a dark room. Metaphysics is looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there. Religion is looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there and shouting "I found it!". Science is looking for a black cat in a dark room with a flashlight.

Schirase

Member

Registered: 2010-02-14

Posts: 6

Re: cfdisk fatal error and strange output of df

OK, my bad, I am still thinking like Slackware user. so I did cfdisk /dev/hda. Just another humilation.
But cfdisk /dev/sda gives me:

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends after end-of-disk
Press any key to exit cfdisk

Primary partion 3 is Windows XP system partition formatted in NTFS, and it boots without problems. cfdisk /dev/sdb works alright too.
I am a bit shocked, since free shows me:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        511540     425952      85588          0      46520     170328
-/+ buffers/cache:     209104     302436
Swap:            0          0          0

I thought my swap is working. I checked the boot messages, and it actually shows [FAIL] when system is trying to activate swap, but I thought it's for system clock etc. step, because I didn't installed NTPD yet. My prepared swap partition is about 1GB.

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: cfdisk fatal error and strange output of df

The "strange" output of df will be fixed in the next release of mkinitcpio. Feel free to patch /lib/initcpio/init_functions if you're impatient (dont forget to rebuild your initcpio after):

diff --git a/init_functions b/init_functions
index 1ae844b..37b9ebb 100644
--- a/init_functions
+++ b/init_functions
@@ -93,5 +93,8 @@ default_mount_handler() {
     else
         rwopt="ro"
     fi
+    if [ -L "${root}" ]; then
+      root=$(readlink -f "${root}")
+    fi
     mount ${fstype:+-t ${fstype}} -o ${rwopt}${rootflags:+,${rootflags}} "${root}" "$1"
 }

---

blog | ±github

Schirase

Member

Registered: 2010-02-14

Posts: 6

Re: cfdisk fatal error and strange output of df

Thank you falconindy, I thought I made some kind of error. I did sudo swapon /dev/sdaX and it works:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        511540     311260     200280          0       8280     133940
-/+ buffers/cache:     169040     342500
Swap:       998844          0     998844

but I don't know why doesn't my swap activate on system startup.