RedHat 7.2 with Reiserfs on Root Partition

Disclaimer: Use this information at your own risk. By using this information, you accept all responsibility for the consequences including (but not limited to) lost data, damaged hardware, nuclear contamination, unexpected pregnancy, or anything else.

Update: 2 Jan 2003: This proceedure works with RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 also. It appears that the mknod steps are not required for Redhat 8.0 since the install disk has the device special entries already in place.

I recently got my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8100 and wanted to put RedHat on it. In the process of getting the pcmcia issues worked out, it became clear that it would be a good idea to install a journalling filesystem. I already had reiserfs installed on my two servers and my main desktop workstation. Since it had been rock-solid, I thought it would be a good candidate for my laptop, too.

So I started looking around the net for a way to do this. After a bit of time with Google, I found this site that had information about installing reiserfs on RedHat 7.1. Apparently they had created a patch for the normal RedHat 7.1 boot disk. They indicated that they wouldn't be making such a patch for RedHat 7.2 and that without such a patch that it wasn't possible to install fresh reiserfs partitions during a RedHat 7.2 install.

Well, being the stubborn type that I am, I figured that if someone else had modified the RedHat boot disk that I could, too. So I started taking apart the boot disk and trying to figure out how it worked. While doing this, I found kernel modules and utilities for reiserfs already on the disk. This made me think that everything was already in place to do what I wanted, so I went ahead and tried it out. Sure enough, RedHat 7.2 *is* set up to do reiserfs. Apparently they don't want you to know about it, though, since it doesn't show up during the installation procedure.

Here are my notes about how to install fresh reiserfs partitions during an install of RedHat 7.2. Note that these installation instructions are based on my install from a stock RedHat 7.2 cdrom with the text setup option.

Go through the setup until you get to the part about partitioning your disk called Disk Partitioning Setup.
Hit alt-F2 to switch to a console.
Make a device special node for your hard drive. If you're not sure what major and minor device numbers to use, you can check this list.
```
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda b 3 0
```
Manually run fdisk and create your partitions.
```
/usr/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda
```
Save your partition changes, write table to disk and exit. Don't forget to set the partition types. These will probably be 83 (Linux) and 82 (Linux swap).
Make the block special devices for the partitions you want reiserfs on.
```
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda1 b 3 1
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda2 b 3 2
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda2 b 3 3
...
...
```
Note that if you're going to use lilo, you should have a separate non-reiserfs partition to store your kernel images on. I created a 64MB ext2 partition that will be mounted as /boot. This is because the version of lilo that ships with RedHat 7.2 does not understand reiserfs. Therefore, it needs to be a filesystem that lilo does understand...like ext2. I don't use grub, so I can't say whether it would work with kernel images stored on reiserfs.
Now put reiserfs on the partitions you want.
```
/usr/bin/mkreiserfs /dev/hda3
...
...
```
Hit alt-F1 and switch back to the installation program. You should still be on the Disk Partitioning Setup screen. select the fdisk option and hit q in fdisk to exit. That will get you past the Disk Partitioning Setup screen.
When you get to the part about formatting your partitions, don't choose to format the reiserfs partitions. (after all...you just did that!) It's ok to format any ext2 filesystems as long as you don't need the data on those anymore.
Continue with your installation!!!