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Filesystems tips

Remounting filesystem with new attributes

mount -o remount,rw /

you can also loop mount cd images

mount -t iso9660 -o loop /iso/documents.iso /mnt/cdimage

List partitions

fdisk -l

partprobe - inform the OS of partition table changes

One of the major benefits to using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that once the operating system is up and running, it tends to stay that way. This also holds true when it comes to reconfiguring a system; mostly. One Achilles heel for Linux, until the past couple of years, has been the fact that the Linux kernel only reads partition table information at system initialization, necessitating a reboot any time you wish to add new disk partitions to a running system.
The good news, however, is that disk re-partitioning can now also be handled 'on-the-fly' thanks to the 'partprobe' command, which is part of the 'parted' package.

Using 'partprobe' couldn't be more simple. Any time you use 'fdisk', 'parted' or any other favorite partitioning utility you may have to modify the partition table for a drive, run 'partprobe' after you exit the partitioning utility and 'partprobe' will let the kernel know about the modified partition table information. If you have several disk drives and want to specify a specific drive for 'partprobe' to scan, you can run 'partprobe <device_node>'

Of course, given a particular hardware configuration, shutting down your system to add hardware may be unavoidable, it's still nice to be given the option of not having to do so and 'partprobe' fills that niche quite nicely.

partprobe [-d] [-s] [devices...]

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the partprobe command.
partprobe is a program that informs the operating system kernel of partition table changes, by requesting that the operating system re-read the partition table.

OPTIONS
This program uses short UNIX style options.

-d

Don't update the kernel.

-s

Show a summary of devices and their partitions.

-h

Show summary of options.

-v

Show version of program.

Converting ext 2 to ext3 File System

To convert an ext2 filesystem to ext3, log in as root and type the following command in a terminal:
/sbin/tune2fs -j <block_device>
where <block_device> contains the ext2 filesystem you wish to convert.

A valid block device could be one of two types of entries:

A mapped device — A logical volume in a volume group, for example, /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02.

A static device — A traditional storage volume, for example, /dev/hdbX, where hdb is a storage device name and X is the partition number.

Issue the df command to display mounted file systems.

For the remainder of this section, the sample commands use the following value for the block device:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02

You must recreate the initrd image so that it will contain the ext3 kernel module. To create this, run the mkinitrd program. For information on using the mkinitrd command, type man mkinitrd. Also, make sure your GRUB configuration loads the initrd.

If you fail to make this change, the system still boots, but the file system is mounted as ext2 instead of ext3.