Filesystem of Centos 5.4 image
Hello! I suppose, that filesystem of particular image is ext4. Is there any reasons why images must be ext4? Because now I must search Linux with ext4 just to fetch its contents :( It is not very easy, because I use some not so young Linux distributions and upgrading them is not an option right now. My suggestion - keep images filesystem ext3. Thanks!
I will check later, but all of the images are supposed to be in ext3 format. If the CentOS 5.4 image is in ext4 format that was accidental. Which image are you trying to use: xen, vmdk, qemu? 64-bit?
I am using XEN image centos.5-4.x86.20091105.img.tar.bz2
It is possible that image is broken of course, since I have no boxes with Ext4 support right now.
I tried newest mandriva image and cannot mount it too.
mount -o loop mandriva.2010-0.x86.img /m
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Did you try the mount command with the file type argument?(granted, it should not be necessary)
mount -t ext3 ....
I just looked and all the CentOS and Mandriva images are in ext3 and are mountable on various systems I use, not to mention bootable. Both the file and df commands report them as ext3. The program that generates the images does not even support ext4 yet, although that would be a good idea....
I found what was the problem. I was extracting image with midnight commander and apparently run out of temporary space (because centos 5.4 image is 10GB) which resulted in partial extracted image (without even a warning from mc).
Glad you got it working. That brings up another point though: the images are stored as sparse files so the image should not actually be taking up 10GB. I tar them with the -S option to preserve the sparseness. The CentOS 5.4 image uses 516 MB according to du.
# du -h centos.5-4.x86.img
516M centos.5-4.x86.img
Yes, I think it would be much better, if images were actual size, because I don't think there will be much users who require exact 10GB virtual filesystem. Anyone will resize them as needed anyway.