I struck this little jem today whilst shuffling the partitions around on my MacBook. (In my wisdom, I had made my MacOS X partitions waaay too big, and my Linux partitions waaay too small.)
The back-story is that I had made my MacOS X root and /Users partitions too big. I had successfully shrunk both, however, I discovered MacOS X’s Disk Utility does not support moving partitions, only resizing. So, I created a new non-journalled HFS+ partition, booted into a Linux LiveCD, used rsync to clone the data.
All good and well, except after I deleted the old partition, I found I could not resize a non-journalled partition. Fine, I hit “Enable Journaling”… no dice, it wouldn’t do it, and wouldn’t explain why.
So I was in a pickle. The partition was too small for my needs, there was room to grow it, but it couldn’t do that unless journalling was enabled, and it wouldn’t enable it for me.
Further investigation, I fire up the Terminal and have a squiz on the command line, I spot something rather interesting:
vk4msl-mb:~ root# cd /Volumes/Home vk4msl-mb:Home root# ls .DS_Store .fseventsd Shared .Spotlight-V100 .journal stuartl .TemporaryItems .journal_info_block .Trashes .localized
Ohh yes, that might be a probable cause. rsync it seems, copied the .journal file over. And thus when Disk Utility open()‘s .journal (presumably with O_CREAT), the MacOS X kernel reports EEXIST (the file already exists).
I tried renaming it (with mv):
vk4msl-mb:Home root# mv .journal{,.old}
mv: rename .journal to .journal.old: Operation not permitted
Okay, that didn’t work. That said, the old partition was journalled, this one is not. So it probably doesn’t contain anything of great relevance now. It does have data:
vk4msl-mb:Home root# ls -ld .journal ----------@ 1 root wheel 25165824 Apr 4 2011 .journal
So I decided to kiss it goodbye:
vk4msl-mb:Home root# rm .journal override --------- root/wheel uappnd,uchg,nodump,opaque for .journal? y vk4msl-mb:Home root# rm .journal_info_block override --------- root/wheel uappnd,uchg,opaque for .journal_info_block? y vk4msl-mb:Home root# ls .DS_Store .TemporaryItems .fseventsd Shared .Spotlight-V100 .Trashes .localized stuartl
All gone. Having done this, I now found that Disk Utility was more than happy to not only enable journalling, but grow the partition as I originally asked.
vk4msl-mb:~ root# mount /dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled) devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse) /dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Home (hfs, local, journaled) map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse) map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse) /dev/disk0s7 on /Volumes/Data (hfs, local) vk4msl-mb:~ root# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/disk0s2 93Gi 20Gi 73Gi 22% / devfs 123Ki 123Ki 0Bi 100% /dev /dev/disk0s3 242Gi 82Gi 160Gi 34% /Volumes/Home map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /net map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /home /dev/disk0s7 84Gi 893Mi 83Gi 2% /Volumes/Data
If others find themselves in this sticky situation, this might be a way out. I would strongly advise they back up any data before messing with file systems in this manner however.
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