In the original installation of Linux, I had not created a
/home, deciding to place my personal files under
/usr. Since I had a some unused space on the drive, I used
fdisk to create a new partition to hold user files,
swallowing up all the free space on the drive, the
intention being to mount this partition on /home. Once the
partition was created, I used mkfs to create an ext2 file
system, like so:
mkfs /dev/hda7
but got the error message: "Invalid argument passed to ext2 library while setting up superblock".
I couldn't find much help on working around this problem on the web, or even what caused it. In the end, I made the partition slightly smaller than the available space - the problem went away and the file system was formatted - but I'm not sure if that was really the proper cure.
I made an entry in /etc/fstab of the following form:
/dev/hda7 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
to ensure that /dev/hda7 was mounted on /home at boot time.
