Ext3 users - Mar 2003 - help!: can't resize partition ("rather strange layout")

Hello,
First off, I'm not sure if my problem is with my filesystem, or with my
partition table, so this may or may not be the appropriate list for this
question - if not, I'd appreciate being pointed to a more appropriate forum.
My problem is that when trying to resize, copy or move my ext3 partition in
parted, I get the following error:

No Implementaion: this ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout! Parted
can't resize this (yet).

Listing my paritions in parted properly shows it as ext3, so I'm not sure
whether there is any significance to the error referring to it as ext2. My
situation is fairly complex, and I'm not sure which parts of it may be
relevant to the problem, so I'm just going to give a complete case history,
please bear with me:

Originally my partition layout was thus:
1: fat32 (~50gb)
2: ext3 boot paritiion (~100mb)
3: ext3 root partition (~25gb)
4: extended partition containing:
5: logical parition, (linux swap, ~512mb)

Having finally migrated fully to linux (phoebe 2), I decided to rid myself of
windows once and for all - booted onto a partition magic 8 boot floppy, and told
it to nuke the fat32 partition, move the boot partition to the front of the
drive, and resize the root parition to fill the remaining space. But parition
magic errored out during the process... unfortunately, in my frantic state to
see if my data was still there, I clicked through the error messages without
writing them down - there was something about inodes and superblocks (I know,
not very helpful). After this, parition magic showed the entire drive as
"Bad". Booting onto my redhat resuce CD, I was relieved to find that
my root parition was still there and readable, still listed as parition 3. 1 was
gone, and 2 was there, but unmountable, and parted said something about it not
ending on a cylinder (i think?) boundary. I deleted this bad parition, and ran
the phoebe 3 installer (which i had been planning on upgrading!
 to as soon as I got the paritioning situation squared away) and selected an
upgrade install, letting it put the kernel and the rest of /boot on the root
partition, and point grub there. So my system now boots fine, but I'm unable
to resize the root parition to fill the remaining 50gigs of space on the drive.
I'm wary of trying parition magic again after what it did the last time.
Curiously, my 3 remaining partitions are listed in parted as partitions 3-5,
even though there are no partitions 1 and 2.

I googled for the error message, and found someone advising to use ext2resize...
which I downloaded and installed... but it seems to be only for resizing a
filesystem to fill its partition, not actually resizing the parition, so it
doesn't seem to be what I need.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

************************************************************************
Kevin Bowen
UCSD ACS/Network Operations, Customer Support Help Desk
kevin@ucsd.edu / (858) 534-1857  /  http://www-no.ucsd.edu
Phone Support: 7 AM to 7 PM / Walk-in Support: 10 AM to 3:30 PM
************************************************************************

On Mar 11, 2003  16:43 -0800, Kevin Bowen wrote:
> First off, I'm not sure if my problem is with my filesystem, or with my
partition table, so this may or may not be the appropriate list for this
question - if not, I'd appreciate being pointed to a more appropriate forum.
My problem is that when trying to resize, copy or move my ext3 partition in
parted, I get the following error:
> 
> No Implementaion: this ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout! Parted
can't resize this (yet).
Depending on which version of parted you have, you may need to upgrade.
You can also try ext2resize (an old version of which is what the code in
parted is based on), or resize2fs (included in your e2fsprogs).

If you are doing anything other than just resizing (i.e. moving) your
partition, then you need parted, and probably need to ask on the parted
user mailing list bug-parted@gnu.org I believe.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/