HOWTO: Tweak your ext3 filesystem for a performance boost

[xyz]

Hi everyone and thanks for this great help/howto.
When I run the following I get this:

th@ubuntu:~$ sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hda1
tune2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

and GoldBuggie wrote:

(There have been reports of problems when rebooting if the following is not done)
Before rebooting change the filesystem manually to writeback.

I'm a newbie and I would apprciate any help you'd pass on to me.
From what I understand, it seems important to run sudo tune2fs....and I don't understand what is meant by "bad magic number" and what can be done to fix this?

[Shin Natsume]

to my horror it deleted the windows partition from the grub menu on my friends pc, luckily enough i saved a copy of the grub menu b4 hand, so all i have to do is add the info into the the new menu.lst

ciao

[Brando569]

Hi everyone and thanks for this great help/howto.
When I run the following I get this:

th@ubuntu:~$ sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hda1
tune2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

I'm a newbie and I would apprciate any help you'd pass on to me.
From what I understand, it seems important to run sudo tune2fs....and I don't understand what is meant by "bad magic number" and what can be done to fix this?

the bad magic number error is because hda1 isnt your root (/) partition. look in your /etc/fstab file and look for a forward slash (/) and see what drive/partition it corresponds to. that should fix it

[benplaut]

looks like a decent chance of problems... i'll skip.

/me waits for dapper to download... i want reiser on that install!

[syuusuke]

do i just use this command to reverse the tune2fs setting?
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_ordered /dev/hda1

[GoldBuggie]

do i just use this command to reverse the tune2fs setting?
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_ordered /dev/hda1

That and removing the fstab and grub changes will do it.

/me waits for dapper to download... i want reiser on that install!

Everyone has his or her choice but I've noticed that on some commands ext3 is noticably faster then reiserfs. So reiserfs doesn't mean a faster filesystem. It just means different fs. It all depends on your need and what you do to your system. ext3, reiserfs & xfs are all good fs. I currently have reiserfs on this install but I will change on next install since for me I have found some things that isn't to my liking. But to each his own.

Cheers

[quadomatic]

this is proly a really stupid question (im a total noob )

when i do sudo kate /etc/fstab, it says kate isn't a command. im using ubuntu 5.1....is kate a kubuntu only command or something?

[southernman]

Your correct, Kate is KDE specific. You'd need to run:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

you could also do

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

The latter may be more user friendly if you've not used command line editors before.

[quadomatic]

nm, i figured out kate was kde text editor. i just used gedit. suprisingly, i didn't screw up my system! I'm not sure yet how much faster its running....

do i need to worry about something happening if i update the kernel? or should i update it with no worries?

[GoldBuggie]

do i need to worry about something happening if i update the kernel? or should i update it with no worries?

Update with no worries