restore of /boot on ext4 filesystem not supported ?

[munchauser]

Hi,

I have a problem when I try to restore a REAR image to another machine. REAR is installed from EPEL on a RHEL6 box, in version 1.16.1, the config uses OUTPUT=PXE and BACKUP=rsync. The filesystems are ext4 for /boot and / (/ is on LVM, /boot is on it's own partition).

The backup process runs fine, the restore process too, but when I reboot the system it hangs just after grub with an error 16: "Inconsistent filesystem structure".

But if I reboot with a live distro, and if I backup the /boot partition, make it ext2 instead of ext4 and restore the /boot content, then after a reboot the OS boots normally.

Both /boot and / are on ext4, but the restore seems to only fail for /boot. Is ext4 supported for the /boot partition ?

[gdha]

@Rosco-github have you checked the log file of rear on the restored system (check under /root/ directory)?

[pavoldomin]

looks like this is a rhel bug : https://access.redhat.com/solutions/67123

[munchauser]

@gdha Yes, I've checked the logs and they return normal messages, the filesystems are created, the files are copied without problems. Pavoldomin is right, it is a bug from the RedHat, last updated on dec 2011. It is tracked in bugzilla (761201) but it seems it is only open to the devs, I cannot read it.

I guess it will be faster to convert all my machines to /boot on ext2.

edit: I've tested after converting the /boot partition of the source machine to ext2 and the backup/restore/reboot process works perfectly fine. It's too bad because on some appliances (EC2) we have no choice on the filesystem of the boot partition and I'm not sure that we can easily convert it. It would be much better if redhat updated grub.