make_ext3fs?

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Nov 15, 2011, at 8:01 AM, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Android uses a tool called "make_ext4fs". You give it a file system  
> size and a directory, and it creates a file of the specified size  
> that contains the content of the directory as an EXT4 file system  
> (for loopback mount or dd purposes).
>
> I have STFW, but have been unable to find such a tool for EXT3 or  
> below. Is anyone aware of such a tool readily available?


At least on my UBUNTU system there is only mkfs.ext2. mkfs.ext3 and  
mkfs.ext4 exist, but they link to mkfs.ext2.

I've never actually made an ext3 fs using mkfs.ext3, I always use  
mkfs.ext2. You can create one in one step with the -j option (create a  
journal).

I don't, I just make an ext2fs and then use tune2fs  to add a journal,  
and some other options that matter to me, such as reducing the  
reserved for root percentage (not needed IMHO on an FS that only  
contains media files), the automatic check interval and so on.

I also reduce the number of inodes as most of my disks are for storage  
(and not actual system operation). On the system disks I took the  
default I'm less than 20% used, on one I reduced it, I'm dangerously  
close to 93% used (which is still 45,000 free on a 40g drive). On my  
1.5tb media disk, I've used less than 3% of the inodes, but 99% of the  
space.

You could just do it with mkfs.ext2 -j -i 65536 /dev/<partition>

I hope this helps.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(