16TB / ext4 problem - not sure what to do now

I started to post in this thread about the problems I was having after I grew my array to 18TB. The array gew fine, but the resize command would not work for my filesystem. Using (livecd) gparted/part magic did not work, as gparted found problems with the partition (though OMV showed no issues). I figured I would make a new thread to discuss solutions to this problem.

[solved] Resize doesn't work

I attempted to run a gparted 'check' on the partition to resolve any problems, but it eventually crashes (I watched it keep coming up with 'short reads' while reading journal superblock) when trying to do something to the partition. Eventually all these error messages caused the GUI to crash.

I killed gparted, rebooted (fsck ran) and all is OK.

I do not believe I can use gparted to resize my filesystem. What are my options now?

Is it possible to convert to another file system that will support 16TB (I do not have the extra drives to temporarily store this data (~12TB)).

Can I shrink the array to 15GB? (I am using 8x3TB drives, RAID-6. With 6x3TB I had 12GB, was trying to grow to ~18GB).

Any options that you can think of where I can use the full size of this array (8x3TB?)

Edit - I found this.. fstransform, anyone familiar with it? - http://sourceforge.net/projects/fstransform/

I have a plan..

• I've ordered 2x 5TB USB3 external drives which I will use to backup the data.
• I will then delete the current ext4 file system, and re-create a new filesystem using XFS extending to the full 18TB.
• Then I plan on copying the data back to the new XFS file system.

Assumptions

• The latest stable build of OMV can create and properly operate an XFS file system (I plan on verifying that on a virtual PC).
• Samba can provide shares and properly operate on an XFS file system (need to verify again with virtual pc)

If anyone has any suggestions or trips around doing this, I would appreciate it! I plan on taking screenshots of all the samba/shares, etc.. so I can re-create them as they were (perhaps I can just copy and save smb.conf?).

Thanks! Just a though though.. If I wipe the OS, install Wheezy, install Krazilec (sp?), when I create the new file system, I should be able to use etx4 to create a file system larger than 16TB, right? I'm questioning the need for XFS if I use a Wheezy base install..

Thanks! I'll give that a try, and if it fails for some reason, use XFS as a backup. I like what I've ready about XFS and think it might be a better match for HTPC / streaming video than EXT4, but the lack of robust tools like fsck for it concern me. I think the real bottleneck for any HTPC /streaming video operations is wifi transfer anyway.

Zitat

xfs has fsck. Maybe you don't have xfsprogs installed??

Thanks! I have not even tried XFS yet, this was just from research I had done comparing EXT4 and XFS. A consistent comment seemed to be that the support tools for XFS were not as mature or robust as the equivalent tools for EXT4. Perhaps I was reading outdated information.