This has already been posted some other places but I figured I would post it here since it may save someone some time. I just formatted a new hard drive with Gparted for use with my computer. Under Windows, my Ext2ifs drivers would not work for the new partition but worked just fine for the old partitions (I have two hard drives). It seems like 0.4.1-2, the newest version of Gparted, changes the inode size to 256 bytes from its previous 128 bytes (I don't know if its an addition to this particular version since I haven't gotten a new version in a long time). This causes the old reliable ext2ifs drivers to not work with the partition. It still detects and mounts the partition but asks you to format every time you try to access the partition. The ext2fsd drivers work just fine with this new inode size but I'm uncertain whether I will change it back to 128 bytes or not with mkfs.
Note this next part is all speculation since I really am not too interested in inodes and thus I am not gonna search this. I am assuming the size increase of the inode was to support more blocks. More blocks allows largers capacity files as well as filesystems. May seem silly to double the size of the inode since just 1 more byte would give 256 times the previous limit but as you know, people like to do things in powers of two in many cases (especially when fragmentation problems can occur).
Note this next part is all speculation since I really am not too interested in inodes and thus I am not gonna search this. I am assuming the size increase of the inode was to support more blocks. More blocks allows largers capacity files as well as filesystems. May seem silly to double the size of the inode since just 1 more byte would give 256 times the previous limit but as you know, people like to do things in powers of two in many cases (especially when fragmentation problems can occur).
