1 Topic by seans potato business

  • seans potato business
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  • Registered: 2007-02-23
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Topic: How to change inode size when formatting with ext3

I would like to format a hard-drive using Gparted Live version 0.3.7-7

The installable file system (IFS) that I use with WinXP can only read drives formatted with ext3 with an inode size of 128, yet GParted would appear to be formatting with a larger inode size. How do I specify, through the GUI, that GParted should use a smaller inode size?

Thanks.

MSI K8N Neo4 SLI Platinum (model MS-7100) / 64-bit Athlon 3200+
2x1024 Mb Corsair Value RAM PC3200
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2 Reply by stormhead (edited by stormhead 2008-09-01 00:36:47)

  • stormhead
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  • Registered: 2008-07-31
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Re: How to change inode size when formatting with ext3

Hi!

As far as I know... you simply don't. The GUI has no option for this.
Instead, you should go to the command line, create your file system using mkfs.ext2 (don't forget the -j parameter since this turns on journalling - and effectively creates an ext3 file system), and specify the inode size using the -I parameter:

mkfs.ext2 -j -I 128 /dev/...

Which driver do you use to access ext3 from within Windows? The latest version (0.46a) of ext2fsd ( http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ ) should - according to the change log on the project page - properly handle 256-byte-inodes, so maybe there's no need to go to the command line.