Legacy GRUB and 256 byte inode

[jpr]

I have a full Puppy-421 installation in a ext3 partition, along with GRUB in its own ext3 partition.
GRUB is chainloaded from the WinXP bootloader.

I just did a full install of Puppy-431 on a new partition. I used Puppy-431 GParted to format it to ext3.
I added a GRUB entry for Puppy-431.
On boot, GRUB threw error 2 : Bad file or directory type

After looking into the problem, I found it to be the inode size being 256 bytes, and the Legacy GRUB can't handle it.
The easiest thing to do is to reformat the new partition with 128 byte inode.

Code: Select all

mkfs.ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda1

But is it the best way forward?
Should I upgrade my GRUB to a newer version, to avoid problems in the future?
How do the latest releases of Puppy deal with this? Are they using patched versions of Legacy GRUB or GRUB 2?

Thanks.

[rjbrewer]

It isn't Grub that is the inode problem.
Puppy uses legacy Grub by default.
Gparted changed in the 4.21 series.
Make the partitions with the 4.21 or later Gparted and
it will work for any version.

[jpr]

It isn't Grub that is the inode problem.
Puppy uses legacy Grub by default.
Gparted changed in the 4.21 series.
Make the partitions with the 4.21 or later Gparted and
it will work for any version.

Hmm, I am not sure I am following your post.

I made the partitions for GRUB and Puppy-421 with the Puppy-421 Live CD and they are working fine. The GRUB was also installed from Puppy-421.

This time around I used GParted from Puppy-431 and it made the partition unrecognizable to GRUB.

Did you mean I need to use GParted from Puppy-421 or earlier?

[rjbrewer]

Been quite a while since I experienced the problem.
Here's a more complete discussion.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 03&t=48002

[jpr]

rjbrewer,
Your post indicates that Puppy 4.30+ came out with an upgraded GRUB, capable of handling the 256-byte inode.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 549#352549

So, is it still the Legacy GRUB?
I guess I will need to upgrade my GRUB installation after all.

[rjbrewer]

Yes, it's still Legacy Grub, but may be slightly different than
the 4.2 and earlier Grub
I assumed it was just a Gparted change.

In any case, it is completely unlike Grub2 or Grub4dos and
is what I've used for my full installs for about 3 years.

[Karl Godt]

Legacy grub lacks many newer features , that had been patched by the distros .

Debian stopped to patch legacy grub to support ext4 fs .

Puppy 4.3 grub does support ext4 .

I have found for grub-0.97 25 patches by debian, 23 from a .rpm distro and 10 from arch linux (incl ext4 patch) .

arch calls the inode diff 'grub-inode-size.patch'

and debian 'ext3_256byte_inode.patch'

And the patches are same despite some different tabs or spaces .