mke2fs with a specified size and the default-enabled "discard" option will discard data after that specified size. If using the size (and potentially offset) to write a partition within a disk or disk image, this will zero part of the following partition. Steps to reproduce: # Make a 128M disk filled with 0x0a, to see which bytes get written yes '' | dd iflag=fullblock of=test.img bs=1M count=128 # Show the disk filled with 0x0a hd test.img # Make a 1M filesystem, which shouldn't touch the remaining 127M mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 -I 256 test.img 1M # Show the disk, which has had data discarded to the 16M boundary hd test.img This also applies if you pass an offset; for instance, passing offset=4096 will discard data from 4096 to 16M+4096 before writing the filesystem. Passing -E nodiscard works around this; the remainder of e2fsprogs does seem to avoid writing outside the bounds. (Discovered via some debugging adventures with disk image building. Also reported to Debian as https://bugs.debian.org/989630 since I first encountered it there, but sending to linux-ext4 as a more appropriate place for e2fsprogs bug reports.) - Josh Triplett
