Hi guys. I was planning to convert my storage drive of 3TB GPT disk (2TB EXT4 + 1TB NTFS) to a 1 partition of 3TB XFS.

I currently have files stored on the drive and do not want to lose them in the process.

What would be the smartest way to convert?

*Also please feel free to leave your opinions on EXT4 vs XFS. I plan to use the Drive mainly for videos, files, Linux backups and Virtual Machine Storage (XFS Strong point).

Thank you!

How much data is currently stored on the file systems?

You have to copy the data to another drive(s) (backups?). There is no process that I know about for linux filesystems that will convert on the fly except for ext2/3/4.

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So you want to change the ext4 filesystem to xfs, change the ntfs filesystem to xfs, merge the partitions, and expand the xfs filesystem to use the new larger partition, all on-the-fly without losing any data?

Never going to happen.

Copy the data elsewhere, wipe the drive, create a new partition and XFS filesystem from scratch, copy the data back.

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Thanks thats what I was thinking but I wanted to make sure that there was no easier way out of this.

Oh, there are ways, but I wouldn't recommend them without a complete and verified backup.

1. Move the files in the NTFS partition to the ext4 partition. Depending on the space available, you might need to shrink the NTFS partition and move & expand the ext4 partition repeatedly in order to do that.
2. Shrink the ext4 partition to the minimum possible size.
3. Move the ext4 partition to the end of the disk.
4. Remove the (empty) NTFS partition and create a new XFS partition as large as possible.
5. Move files from the ext4 partition to the XFS partition. Again depending on space available, you might have to repeatedly move some files, move & shrink the ext4, and expand the XFS.
6. Remove the empty ext4 partition and expand the XFS partition to fill the disk.
7. Check to see how much of your data actually survived all that.

Just repartitioning/reformatting the disk and restoring everything from that backup would be way simpler and faster.

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Hello, please see the top of the notice of this website.

""Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community."

Telling someone that something is "Never going to happen" does absolutely nothing to solve the problem or answer the question they had. Furthermore you condescendingly laid out the steps the OP was getting at wanting to do. Which were already quite clear. You did this to line up your "Never going to happen" jab.

The only part of your response that had any merit to it was the last sentence.

I guess we really ought to remove your name from being posted. Not sure your online name is appropriate.

Otherwise, posting that someone seems rude to you and then insulting him is kind of a two wrongs don't make a right. However the post you refer to wasn't a rude post. As noted above there doesn't seem to be a current one step way. Generally we think of conversion being an in place event that some filesystems can do.

To the OP. You could do it in chunks. Not any simple solution that I know of. No one step process will do.


Heed the warning of backup.