I am wondering if the common advice about running tune2fs -O^has_journal to convert to ext2 before shrinking is still meaningful. Shrinking ext3 with journal seems to work fine, but I haven't seen anything in the e2fsprogs release notes about the change being made, or any direct answer googling around.
Should I have any reservations about shrinking ext3 or 4 with a journal? If not, when did resize2fs shrink begin to support a journal being present?
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i'm not sure where this "common advice" to remove the journal before resizing came from, to be honest. Shrinking an ext3 file system has always worked as long as I can remember….
Can you offer up a reference of where this "common knowledge" came from?
Thanks!!
Ted
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I am not sure if these are even where I saw the advice when I posted the question. I just googled for "ext3 shrink journal". I was curious if this might have come from more "official" sources, so I checked Red Hat's docs-It's in there:
This is for RHEL4 but it looks like it's copied from the same text from RHEL3 and that the whole document is deleted in RHEL5. I feel like I remember this from the pre-RHEL days but I haven't found any documentation yet.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that this has turned out to be a myth. Thanks for your reply!
John
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Yeah, this makes no sense. RHEL3 was released in late 2003, and resize2fs definitely should have been able to handle ext3 file sysems by then. The first ext3 support went into e2fsprogs in August 2000, and I was using ext3 from almost the very beginning.
(Resize2fs support was folded in in 1997, so it does predate ext3, but by 2003 I'm sure resize2fs was fully supporting ext3.)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I am wondering if the common advice about running tune2fs -O^has_journal to convert to ext2 before shrinking is still meaningful. Shrinking ext3 with journal seems to work fine, but I haven't seen anything in the e2fsprogs release notes about the change being made, or any direct answer googling around.
Should I have any reservations about shrinking ext3 or 4 with a journal? If not, when did resize2fs shrink begin to support a journal being present?
i'm not sure where this "common advice" to remove the journal before resizing came from, to be honest. Shrinking an ext3 file system has always worked as long as I can remember….
Can you offer up a reference of where this "common knowledge" came from?
Thanks!!
A couple of links:
http://linuxnextgen.blogspot.com/2010/10/shrink-ext3-partition-without-losing.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions
I am not sure if these are even where I saw the advice when I posted the question. I just googled for "ext3 shrink journal". I was curious if this might have come from more "official" sources, so I checked Red Hat's docs-It's in there:
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/System_Administration_Guide/The_ext3_File_System-Reverting_to_an_ext2_File_System.html
This is for RHEL4 but it looks like it's copied from the same text from RHEL3 and that the whole document is deleted in RHEL5. I feel like I remember this from the pre-RHEL days but I haven't found any documentation yet.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that this has turned out to be a myth. Thanks for your reply!
John
Yeah, this makes no sense. RHEL3 was released in late 2003, and resize2fs definitely should have been able to handle ext3 file sysems by then. The first ext3 support went into e2fsprogs in August 2000, and I was using ext3 from almost the very beginning.
(Resize2fs support was folded in in 1997, so it does predate ext3, but by 2003 I'm sure resize2fs was fully supporting ext3.)