Package: e2fsprogs Version: 1.39+1.40-WIP-2006.11.14 Severity: wishlist When working with veritual machines, like qemu and xen, it would be very convenient if I could use mkfs to create a file system at an offset into the virtual disks used by these virtual machines.
When working with an virtual /dev/hda, for example, the disk consist of a boot block, partition table and partitions. I want to create the image and populate the file systems without booting the virtual machine, and this would be a lot easier if mkfs supported offsets. I want to do something like this # Create the disk image dd bs=1M count=10240 if=/dev/zero of=harddisk.img # Create partition table fdisk -C <cylinders> harddisk.img # Make file systems mke2fs -j --offset <startofpart> harddisk.img <partsize> # Mount partition to fill it with files mount -o loop,offset=<startofpart> harddisk.img /mnt This do not work, as mke2fs can't create a file system starting at an offset into the 'device' it is given. I know this can be done using losetup, but it would be easier if mke2fs supported this directly. Friendly, -- Petter Reinhoildtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
