Comment 5 for bug 450906

As Loic noticed, To work with current U-Boot, EXT2 should be formatted using "mkfs.ext2 -I 128" to limit node size to 128.
It is recommended to format the ext2 file system with "-I 128" to work properly with U-Boot.
Latest mainline U-Boot include a patch that fixes inode calculation and should support inodes with larger size; we are considering applying this patch to our U-Boot.

http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob;f=fs/ext2/ext2fs.c;h=d54f60b30b9397f6955b9c26df98eeb1f2cd6675;hb=master

Michael - Can you please apply this patch and see if it fixes your issue, meanwhile I am having issues with installing ubuntu and can't re-produce it.