there are two ssd . one has Debian installed with an ext4 file system. I need to migrate Debian to a second ssd that has an ext2 file system. how to do it correctly?


what will need to be edited ? fstab? initrdfs?

Usually when you migrate an operating system from one disk to another, you migrate it en-masse, including the filesystem. Use CloneZilla or similar to do the job.

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can I change the file system during migration?

Not with CloneZilla as far as I know - you would have to copy individual files over or freshly install. However, the way ext is designed is that ext3 = ext2 + features, ext4 = ext3 + even more features. You can just use tune2fs to switch off all the ext3 and ext4 features on your ext4 system to effectively turn it into ext2.

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why does it have to be ext2, why can't you use ext4.

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I need a non-journaling file system

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Well, or suddenly I would like to change ext4 to btrfs

cp -a -p -d -R will not help here?

ssd 1 =sda1
ssd2 =sdb

that's bullshit?

you can even disable journaling on ext4, just I don't understand why do you want it?

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In that case, use ext4 and turn the has_journal feature off.

Do this to the filesystem offline.

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that was a very helpful answer. I learned how to turn off logging. Thank you so much. but tell me is it possible to change like I wrote way above the file system to ext4 to btrfs?

I do not really understand that. More or less correct. You need to create a new filesystem and copy all the files using cp, tar, rsync, whatever you want.

Just I don't know what is that chroot, /root/vdisk ...
You must not copy a running system.

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I can understand how you can copy the operating system to another file system different from the one on which it was installed

The operating system that I will copy is not running on machines. I install Gentoo on arm. and it's hard to explain what I will do. You do not pay attention to what I do. more important is the answer whether it is possible to copy a non-running operating system onto a disk with a different file system.

The answer is yes, with some limitations. Depending on how the system is set up, you may find that it will not load due to the wrong filesystem support in the initramfs (whatever that is in the case of the distro you're using). I hit that problem when I used cp -a to transfer an Arch system from ext4 to xfs. I could boot, but I needed to use the fallback initramfs, because the standard one did not have support for xfs during the early part of the boot.

Other than that and editing /etc/fstab to match new UUID or /dev/sdXX, the only other problem I've seen is if the system is set up for hybernation - that may mean that there is a UUID stored to let it know where to write the hibernation data to. That is annoying rather than fatal, and finding where that data is stored seems to differ from distro to distro.

The nice things is, unlike Windows, Linux does not care where files are located, so a copy (whether you use cp or rsync, etc.) will work fine.

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I corrected fstab


What needs to be changed in the initramfs? thanks for the answer