yoshii
August 12th, 2016, 09:14 PM
Be careful if you use the new gParted for new partitions. It uses newer filesystem tools and can format some new features into the new partitions that your system probably isn't new enough to be able to handle.
Looking at: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted
You can see that gParted uses e2fsprogs (http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/) (1.43.1 (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs-1.43.1.tar.gz)) , but a lot of distros aren't using those essential filesystem tools that new yet.
I learned this after getting some non fatal errors and from using an older version of gParted that complained about the new unsupported features.
It's also worth knowing that although gParted tends to be reliable, it's not actually based upon Debian Stable. It's based upon Debian "Sid", which is either UnStable or Testing, I forget which.
This might not be really bad in terms of bugs, but it's bad in terms of incompatibility.
Because of the issues I've seen with this, my fsck isn't new enough to fix my drive if it crashes even though it works fine on older filesystem implementation.
And it could be years until my distro updates it's repositories with versions of e2fsprogs as new as the ones gParted is using.
So be wary. And know that even if you format with ext3 instead of ext4, it's still using the newer version of e2fsprogs, so you might still have the same issue.
EDIT (August 13th, 2016)
I need to say that if you have the opportunity to avoid use of ext4 and to install ext3 instead, it's still worth it. I have discovered that ext4 is still very much in development and is not complete. Some implementations of it, such as in gParted, are based upon Debian UnStable ("Sid").
If you use ext4 you might have some complications with other ext4 filesystem drivers and software. Some of the features are not implemented 100% so some software will do it, and some will reject it with error messages and will not be able to complete normal ext4 tasks.
I was able to mostly recover from some of these compatibility issues, but not all. I had none of these issues at all when I was just using ext3 which is still pretty advanced and stable. To get things working, I had to carefully download ALL of the e2fsprogs files from
https://pkgs.org/download/e2fsprogs
I had to select the Debian "Sid" ones, and also to be sure to check every listing's dependencies because there are more files needed that aren't shown in the initial results.
After that, I used GDebi Package Manager to get an idea of the file contents and their uses. I also used it to show which .DEB archives were needed in terms of dependencies. Still, GDebi Package Manager couldn't be used to install the two main files needed because they are both dependent upon each other and GDebi doesn't know how to reprioritize it's own installs so that they won't fail.
I took a risk and used sudo dpkg -i *.deb to install instead. However, because it doesn't always use the right order of precedence, I had to run it twice for everything to work OK.
Important to notice also, is that during the successful run, it automatically updated initramfs which is needed for kernel booting. This is important because it's otherwise very difficult to manual update the initramfs boot archive. However, the update only affected my most recent kernel, and I couldn't get it to update my other kernels even after I rebooted into them.
Luckily, updated e2fsprogs with these files eliminated most of the errors I was getting and as far as I can tell the system is able to check itself now, whereas before it had an operational snafu halt, yet reported no errors (whatever that means!). Now the main error I get is when I try to enable journal checksumming for both speed and stabilility that feature option is ignored and a minor error message about it displayed.
As far as I know, ext3 is no longer in development and is just stable and ready for use.
The other thing to know about ext4 is that it's not 100% backwards compatible with ext2 and ext3. From what I can tell, ext3 is the best at being both backwards and forwards compatible. If you format as ext4, you can't go back and easily convert or transfer to ext3. Even trying to copy all your files from ext4 to ext3 probably won't work because of symbolic links and protection issues.
So for all these reasons, I recommend staying with ext3 instead of migrating to ext4 no matter how you would do it.
The other advantage to staying with ext3 is that there are alot more tools and techniques for mounting and fixing ext3 than for ext4 since it's stable and not in development and no more features are being added to it. And you still have the option to upgrade to ext4 later on, when it's stabilized.
Looking at: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted
You can see that gParted uses e2fsprogs (http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/) (1.43.1 (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs-1.43.1.tar.gz)) , but a lot of distros aren't using those essential filesystem tools that new yet.
I learned this after getting some non fatal errors and from using an older version of gParted that complained about the new unsupported features.
It's also worth knowing that although gParted tends to be reliable, it's not actually based upon Debian Stable. It's based upon Debian "Sid", which is either UnStable or Testing, I forget which.
This might not be really bad in terms of bugs, but it's bad in terms of incompatibility.
Because of the issues I've seen with this, my fsck isn't new enough to fix my drive if it crashes even though it works fine on older filesystem implementation.
And it could be years until my distro updates it's repositories with versions of e2fsprogs as new as the ones gParted is using.
So be wary. And know that even if you format with ext3 instead of ext4, it's still using the newer version of e2fsprogs, so you might still have the same issue.
EDIT (August 13th, 2016)
I need to say that if you have the opportunity to avoid use of ext4 and to install ext3 instead, it's still worth it. I have discovered that ext4 is still very much in development and is not complete. Some implementations of it, such as in gParted, are based upon Debian UnStable ("Sid").
If you use ext4 you might have some complications with other ext4 filesystem drivers and software. Some of the features are not implemented 100% so some software will do it, and some will reject it with error messages and will not be able to complete normal ext4 tasks.
I was able to mostly recover from some of these compatibility issues, but not all. I had none of these issues at all when I was just using ext3 which is still pretty advanced and stable. To get things working, I had to carefully download ALL of the e2fsprogs files from
https://pkgs.org/download/e2fsprogs
I had to select the Debian "Sid" ones, and also to be sure to check every listing's dependencies because there are more files needed that aren't shown in the initial results.
After that, I used GDebi Package Manager to get an idea of the file contents and their uses. I also used it to show which .DEB archives were needed in terms of dependencies. Still, GDebi Package Manager couldn't be used to install the two main files needed because they are both dependent upon each other and GDebi doesn't know how to reprioritize it's own installs so that they won't fail.
I took a risk and used sudo dpkg -i *.deb to install instead. However, because it doesn't always use the right order of precedence, I had to run it twice for everything to work OK.
Important to notice also, is that during the successful run, it automatically updated initramfs which is needed for kernel booting. This is important because it's otherwise very difficult to manual update the initramfs boot archive. However, the update only affected my most recent kernel, and I couldn't get it to update my other kernels even after I rebooted into them.
Luckily, updated e2fsprogs with these files eliminated most of the errors I was getting and as far as I can tell the system is able to check itself now, whereas before it had an operational snafu halt, yet reported no errors (whatever that means!). Now the main error I get is when I try to enable journal checksumming for both speed and stabilility that feature option is ignored and a minor error message about it displayed.
As far as I know, ext3 is no longer in development and is just stable and ready for use.
The other thing to know about ext4 is that it's not 100% backwards compatible with ext2 and ext3. From what I can tell, ext3 is the best at being both backwards and forwards compatible. If you format as ext4, you can't go back and easily convert or transfer to ext3. Even trying to copy all your files from ext4 to ext3 probably won't work because of symbolic links and protection issues.
So for all these reasons, I recommend staying with ext3 instead of migrating to ext4 no matter how you would do it.
The other advantage to staying with ext3 is that there are alot more tools and techniques for mounting and fixing ext3 than for ext4 since it's stable and not in development and no more features are being added to it. And you still have the option to upgrade to ext4 later on, when it's stabilized.