Tag Archives: troubleshoot

Bypass Ext File System Read-Only Mode on Errors

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If you have poorly written software which corrupts your file system e.g. during its installation, you probably face the problem that once the error occurs, the filesystem will lock for writing, and then your installation suddenly dies, hopeless.

Well, in the case that you want to force it to continue, even after (it) having broken your file system, you can, if it is in the EXT family (EXT2, EXT3 filesystems). The command is (as root) this:

tune2fs -e continue device

device is the one device this option is going to be applied.

Then, after the next reboot, e2fsck (file system check) will check the error, anyway, so you are “safe”. I had two situations installing poorly written software (I hope only the installer is poor in quality), and it helped going on until the end. One of them uses file system intensively and did not present any errors during production execution.

This is analogous to the mount command’s option errors (mount -o errors=continue). Or it can also be one of the options field’s values, in the fstab file e.g. “defaults,errors=continue“.

Importance of Rounding Partitions up to Cylinders

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GParted Gnome Partition Editor Link

The GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) disk partitioning tool provides you with the ability to round up a partition size to cylinders. What is the importance of this? Linux v.s. MSDOS (read Microsoft, or Windows’) partition tables interpret it in different ways when they are not lay out like so.

Debian worked alright when the disk was not partioned in this way. Nevertheless, if you do not want to have headaches e.g. when backing up the information on the extended partitions with the sfdisk utility, which complains if the alignment condition does not apply to your environment, then do the alignment.

Note: to backup the partition table (with information on the primary partitions) you use a simple tool as dd. However, the information on the extended partitions lies on an indirect table pointed to by the main, raw partition table. So this information needs to be accessed by dereferencing such a pointer. The sfdisk utility does just that.

To do so, I used GParted (it provides its own live cd, and it is also provided by several system rescue focused distributions like Parted Magic and the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCd, and many others) and as soon as the system was back online I made the backup with sfdisk without it complaining at all.

Annoying ext3 Partition With No Free Disk Space Left

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Another day I was faced with something that I never seen before. The infamous ext3 5% reserved root space.

What is this all about? Well, when you run out of space available on your ext3 partition the first thing you are going to do is to try and free some disk space by removing files, right? What if you start removing files and then a df command still shows 0 Bytes available.

Weird.

Then you start removing some files say 100 MB Large but, surprisingly, df -m (or df -h, in Linux) insists with the 0 B condition.

Worried.

“Now what?” No matter what you do, you are not getting any free disk space anymore. You remove Giga Bytes and nothing!!!

Panic. A desperation state arises.

“Enough bruhaha!” – you exclaim. Alright.

Panic end with just this line – go on and execute it! (As root or with sudo.)

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/your-device

and those 5% reserved for root are yours once again! Cheers!

Remove Overlay Scrollbars from Ubuntu 11.04 Unity or Linux Mint 11 Katya Gnome 2.x

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Want to get rid of the inappropriate (for the non-touchscreen desktop/laptop computer) scrollbars that were introduced? In Ubuntu 11.04 or Linux Mint 11 Katya, execute the following command:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0

Instead of version 0.1-0 it could be a newer one. Just search it in aptitude, synaptic or whatever package manager you use, or via apt-cache search:

sudo apt-cache search 'liboverlay-scrollbar'

And that’s it! Enjoy your standard scrollbar again!