I'm doing development of an OS based on the 2.4 Linux kernel. Right now I'm porting it to VMWare. When creating the partitions, either on first boot or when the user formats the drive (the user never formats the drive themselves, they use a special command in our OS that takes care of all the system calls for them), it gives the following error:
"EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock"
This only happens in VMWare, not when running on ordinary hardware. After the error is printed, there aren't any other problems with accessing the file system. At least not that we've discovered yet.
The system does a reboot when the user formats the drive, and the error occurs after boot. This has me confused because I expect the kernel to read the partition table at boot time. ON first boot, of course, it simply creates the partitions and starts the OS.
I'm hunting through the kernel source code, as well as our own, to make sure we're reading the partition table at the appropriate time. Honestly I'm not that well versed in how the kernel handles the file system, so it's not going well.
Is there anything special that VMWare does/needs when formatting the virtual disk? Is there some point where I have to force the kernel to re-read the partition table (again)?