Reiserfs

spaceballs · 11-12-2005, 02:02 PM

I have a few extra partitions, and I thought of an idea...just hear me out.

All of my partitions are partitioned as ext3, and I want them to be reiserfs or reiser4. Here is what I want to do, if possible. I have a couple of extra partitions, and I want to back up all of my files to them, and then reformat the partitions that they currently sit on. Then I would copy it all back to the original partition. This isn't so complicated for my home and files, but for / it might get tricky. Any ideas, or would it be safer to leave it the way it is for / ?

Keruskerfuerst · 11-12-2005, 02:12 PM

For the /home partition this is no problem.
But for the / partition you should do a fresh install

PenguinPwrdBox · 11-12-2005, 02:12 PM

If you've got the space, go for it.
Just do it with a live cd.

keefaz · 11-12-2005, 02:19 PM

First make sure you know how you partitions are named, eg
say / is /dev/hda3 and you want to transfer the content in /dev/hda8

(I assume there is a filesystem in /dev/hda8,
if not, just do mkreiserfs /dev/hda8 to format the partition)

I would do :

- boot from a Live CD like slackware CD1 or Knoppix
- create the mountpoints and mount the partitions :

Code:

mkdir /mnt/from
mkdir /mnt/to
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/from
mount /dev/hda8 /mnt/to
cd /mnt/from
tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/to; tar xvf -)

Now that you have copied the whole / partition,
you need to adjust fstab and lilo

Code:

chroot /mnt/to
vi /etc/fstab # edit the new mount point for /, eg here it is /dev/hda8
vi /etc/lilo.conf # update the root partition in lilo : /dev/hda8
lilo # run lilo to take the changes in account
reboot