hi folks,

is there a way to convert ntfs to ext3 or reiser fs without formating the harddisk and erasing all data?

i googled about it, but there seems to be nosolution.........

is this conversion impossible?

thx in advance

The usual conversion procedure, which goes on backgraund is such: Backup your stuff from disk, format it with desired FS and then put the stuff back. There are programms which do that work for you like this one but you can do it yourself as well.

Yep, that adds up to a lot of CDs. Solution offered still works.
Go get another drive and an external housing. Believe me you'll find uses for it.

You have to backup, no other choice. Disk space is at it's cheapest these day, grab another drive to do the backup on then use it after.

I did NTFS -> ext3 conversion with Acronis Disk Director Suite bootable CD. Keeping all the data intact of course.

Too bad it doesn't seem to work the other way which is what I need now.

Kindly listen to the sage but simple advice that you have been given!

You need another drive. Which you put into a disk-enclosure. (Or if you prefer, buy an enclosure with a drive already in it.) This gives you a place to put your data ... and believe me, 200GB is not a lot anymore.

Let me put it to you this way: at a local Target (department store...) you can get an external disk drive with a capacity of 1,000 GB for slightly more than $120 USD.

Of course it will be preformatted with FAT32 or some equally abominable travesty but you can reformat the thing. (If it's bigger than the drive you've got now, just move the data over, pop open the case of the enclosure (to hell with the 'warranty') and swap the drives. Now, all of your data has been copied and you have a bigger drive!)

It's all quite easy to do: it's only unnerving the first time that you do it.

it maybe worth pointing out to future visitors that one of the main reason of using ntfs in the first place is to allow files larger than 4gb, therfore it is likely you will be using windows to backup up the data.
In which case windows needs a 3rd party tool to read/write your new ext2/3 drive.

Or, could use a LiveCD linux version which can mount the NTFS filesystem so you can use Linux to both backup and restore the information.

You can get the ntfs-3g driver for most version of Linux now, so you can read the MS disk and write to eg ext3. The driver reads & write ntfs filesystems.
Be aware though that its not officially supported by RH for legal reasons.