Francesco Potorti` wrote: > > I started building an initrd image for use with loadlin and md (I > wanto to put everything under raid-0). As first step, I needed the > image of an ext2 (or whatever) file system to mount via loopback > device, in order to put into it all the necessary modules and so on. > > First, I realised that, if any docs exist on how to use the loopback > device, they are well hidden. Hints are found in the mount man page > and in the Bootdisk-HOWTO, but nothing general enough. > > Indeed, everyone assumes that you have an image and want to mount it, > but nothing is said about what to do to *create* an image from > scratch. Well, the Bootdisk-HOWTO says how to do, but it does not > work... It says that you just need to do > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/fsfile bs=1k count=nnn > mount -o loop -t ext2 /tmp/fsfile /mnt >
Naturally that won't work since /tmp/fsfile is just full of zeros. Look at the man page for "mke2fs". The following worked fine for me (I couldn't mount since my kernel doesn't support loop-back at this time). (NOTE: the '-F' forces mke2fs to continue even though ~/fs is not a block device.) chilin$ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/fs bs=1024 count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out chilin$ mke2fs -F ~/fs mke2fs 1.10, 24-Apr-97 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09 Linux ext2 filesystem format Filesystem label= 256 inodes, 1024 blocks 51 blocks (4.98%) reserved for the super user First data block=1 Block size=1024 (log=0) Fragment size=1024 (log=0) 1 block group 8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group 256 inodes per group Writing inode tables: done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done chilin$ file ~/fs /home/jbj1/fs: Linux/i386 ext2 filesystem -- Jens B. Jorgensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
