[dundee] Virtual machines can trash your system

[gordon dunlop]

Hi All,

I am just about crying here. The story is that at long last I decided to
upgrade my Fedora 6 to Fedora 7. I waited this long because fedora 6 is
my default system holding all my multimedia, server, virtualisation and
(most importantly ) my wife's document  systems.  I decided that instead
of upgrading via YUM or the  downloaded DVD, that I should create a new
system with the  proper partitions (that I should have done previously),
i.e. having the operating  system spread out over three partitions;
namely /, /home & /var where  /home  would take care of the multimedia
and documents, and /var would take care of the server and virtualisation
systems, comprising of 80% of the disk space. Why I did not want to do a
direct upgrade was that I was transferring from a 32-bit system to a
64-bit system, so by doing a clean install of Fedora 7 whilst
maintaining a fedora 6 system , I was going to transfer the data from
Fedora 6 To Fedora 7 when I satisfied that everything on Fedora 7 was
running O.K. I used a partition manager to manipulate my two SATA disks
to create the space for the Fedora 7 partitions and moving the Fedora 6
partition i.e. data movement. After this was done I booted into my
Ubuntu partition, I knew GRUB on my Fedora 6 partition would not work. I
got a fsck superblock error in Ubuntu (because the Fedora 6 partition
had been moved), this was rectified by editing fstab to set the 
default  binary of the Fedora 6 partition to 0 0 rather than 0 2. I
rebooted where the Fedora 6 partition was picked up by Ubuntu, and using
the  GRUB editor  reinstalled  GRUB into my Fedora 6  partition with the
commands:
GRUB>  root (hd1,6)
GRUB>  setup (hd1,6)
GRUB> quit
hd1,6 is the equivelant of /dev/sda7. I rebooted and  went into the
Fedora 6 system via GAG  boot manager. The menu came up and the system
was initiated, when it came to the file system check it went into fsck
mode (as was expected) It took about  30 minutes  with a lead weight on
the Y key for it to go through its routine to change the inode errors.
It came up with at the end errors it could not correct with root inode
not a directory. I eventually rebooted and went back into the Fedora 6
partition where the GRUB prompt came up and I could not re-install GRUB
due to superblock errors nor could I mount this partition from other
Linux partitions. I was scratching my head trying to work out what was
going on, then I realised that my Windows XP virtual machine (20GB) is a
NTFS file of 20GB.  Here I have a file of 20GB of the NTFS file system
within an EXT 2/3 system. This is why there were problems in correcting
inode errors based upon the ext2/3 fsck system where the Virtual XP file
was preventing this. The virtual Windows XP machine cannot see the file
system of Linux (It has an Aspberger Syndrome complex where it thinks it
is important, but it is only a lowly piece of shit within the system and
does not understand about hierarchies). I now cannot mount the Fedora 6
partition, nor find a way to either destroy or move this XP virtual
machine. I have diagnostic tools, but they only deal with Linux or
Windows file systems, not both. This brings to the conclusion that there
will be problems in large IT environments where heterogeneous systems
using virtualisation systems, especially in looking at Process
Migration. So, if anyone can help me I would be very grateful, not that
I care much for these large IT environments, it is more of how can I
tell my wife that she cannot access her documents. Anyway no more
googling for the answers tonight.

Gordon