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Going LAN Fun with X

Extending the Disk Space

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.

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Going LAN Fun with X