here's the scenario: one of my windows box just got transformed into a bsd(7) box. unfortunatelly, i still have 3 ntfs partitions on the hdd that i would like to convert to ufs. searching google i came to learn that none of the methodes i would use would give me 100% certanty that my data would be 100% readable after the conversion.

the old fashioned way on the other hand is fullproof. by "the old fashioned way" i mean copy-ing all data to another hdd, deleteing the partitions on the first one, manually creating some ufs slices and copy-ing the data back to it. the sole problem is that it takes some time to achieve this, hence i ask you people if any of you ever converted from ntfs to ufs without data loses. if you did, do tell me how (app used, method, etc). if not, suggestions are welcomed, and so are ideas.


what would you do if you were in my shoes? would you go by "the old fashioned way" or try a conversion. keep in mind that the data we are talking about is sensitive information.

me.... evetually i think i'll go by "the old fashioned way" method, how about you?

I go the old fashion way all the time, even if it is not fully used. Never done a conversion like yours but even going vfat to ntfs for customers I backup all data before making the change. Does not matter what utilities I use. If you loss power, power supply blows, motherboard rectifer burns out, or just moving it and vibration loosing a cable that very was connected and not done by me and total disater of clients data. Granted this vfat to ntfs or what works pretty safely, only one glitch and never figured that one out, but the backup saved the data transfer for the customer. So when it comes to data and it is important, always have BACKUPS. Extra hour or so beats weeks, months, or years of data and high cost of data recovery sites that can't always get the data either.

Brian

You're going to need to take a backup before this whole procedure begins anyway, so you might as well use that to restore back onto your new formatted UFS filesystem.

No need to gamble.

Definitely gotta throw my recommendation under the "old-fashioned" method. I don't even know that any tools even *claim* to be able to in-place convert NTFS into *any* partition format. Not to mention the fact that since they're NTFS they're BSD slices, not BSD partitions, and I'd wager a guess that perhaps your BSD slice already has a fixed size? To my knowledge, it's not possible to merge slices together, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

Well even though I'm a *nix newbie, will all the partitioning, reinstalling of different operating systems, and the like, I would have to agree that this is one of those times where doing it the hard way would actually be doing it the easy way. Besides, unless you have several machines in this situation, you probably could have already had it done.

Terry