Comments on: Ubuntu’s Buggy Support for non-ext3fs Partitions

By: Alistair

Alistair — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:31:16 +0000

As a ‘work-around’, I find that the target partition must be marked for formatting during the install (even to the same type, etx2, in my case and even if it has been freshly formatted with, say PQMagic).

Obviously, a re-installation, where any non-system files are hoped to be retained, will fail, so not really an acceptable work-around.

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:05:34 +0000

If you only have a single Linux installation on your disk, there is no reason to create a separate /boot/ partition *normally* and it shouldn’t be a requirement to get Ubuntu installed….

But, yes, it is a valid workaround for this issue.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:34:47 +0000

Why do you need a journal file system for /boot anyway? Just use ext2, it’s better for this purpose and works on all grubs and all distros.

By: Briggs

Briggs — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:08:40 +0000

I have my Gentoo running on only ReiserFS on one machine, and Ubuntu on another. For Ubuntu, I expreinced the problem here with grub installation failing, and had to manuallly install it to the HD.

This is a real problem.

By: onederer

onederer — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:33:51 +0000

I don’t know if this problem also applies only to Ubuntu, because I’ve got Kubuntu installed in two machines, using ReiserFS, and have had no problems. Any feedback on this?

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:57:53 +0000

This is not just Ubuntu, it has always been the case that if you want to use another file system then you create a /boot partition in ext2 or ext3. I have five machines using XFS except for /boot and they all function flawlessly. It would be nice to be able just use xfs, but it is sensible to have /boot, / and /home as separate partitons - it makes upgrades safer.

By: Mee2

Mee2 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:20:06 +0000

I ran into this issue recently when attempting to use the alternate installer to install Ubuntu to an encrypted root partition on a RAID 1 array. The boot partition was a regular RAID 1 with ext3fs, but presumably because the partition is marked as “raid-auto”, it failed.

Installing grub manually from the live CD worked fine.

By: Computer Guru

Computer Guru — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:13:19 +0000

Yes, but /boot/ should not have to be ext3fs in the first place.

By: Pages tagged "fatal"

Pages tagged "fatal" — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:22:30 +0000

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By: El Tigre

El Tigre — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:48:58 +0000

As long as /boot is ext2 or ext3 then the root partition can be whatever your kernel can support.

By: Jared

Jared — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:48:34 +0000

Yep. Hit this yesterday following your how-to. I was pulling my hair out trying to use ReiserFS until I decided to give ext3 a go and it worked perfectly. Seems kinda weird that no devs have fixed this seemingly easy-to-fix bug.