On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> At 7:44 AM -0700 9/21/99, Fabrizio Catalano wrote:
> >root file system type : ext2fs
>                          ^^^^^^
> This is the problem.  There was just a thread discussing it a day or two
> ago.  So people should be ready to help, I hope.
> 
> >Now I should like to use a larger (1GB) disc previously used to try
> >the Debian  Linux for 68k.
> 
> Apparently this Linux distribution sets something in the partition table
> which we don't reset.  Everyone who has hit this problem so far has solved
> it by just reformatting the disk and starting over.  Consequently we don't
> know what is causing it.

I don't think that's it. I think it's that whatever the ext2fs code uses
to check and see if it's an ext2fs (its magic numbers, etc) don't get
erased, so ext2fs matches even though it shouldn't.

Actually, I just looked at the code, and ext2fs puts its superblock 1k in,
while ffs puts it 8k in. Thus newfs won't blow away the signature of a
pre-existing ext2fs. As the matches happen alphabetically, the ext2fs test
will hapen first, thus this lossge..

I'll EMail an amended dd which should test this. As ffs doesn't use the
block with the ext2fs superblock, we can zero just it, and the filesystem
should work perfectly fine.

If this analysis is right..

Take care,

Bill