I have a fresh Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) running on a laptop. where I defined the filesystems as:
- mount point / on ext4 (46 Gb)
- mount point /home on jfs (63 GB)
- swap as 3 Gb
I left the machine over night to do some task, without AC power supply. next day in the morning I found it on standby, task completed, but filesystem was not reachable. it gave me I/O error
it seems that there is a problem with jfs and standby.
anyways, to avoid any hassle, I want to move this mount point from jfs format to ext4.
can I do this without losing data and without the need to place the data in a temporary location until transformation is done?
sorry to mention that, but I recall back in the windows days, we would change a FAT16 to FAT32 or a FAT32 to NTFS without having to lose the data. I hope this is available on Linux.
Update The /home filesystem was xfs not jfs, and it seems there is a bug with this filesystem for some reason, I had to re-install the OS twice until I ended up with ext4 for the entire /
However, as a conclusion, it seems that there is no way to make a conversion
tar
or something similar, since my impression is thatdump
is filesystem specific.man cp
and I'll try it soon, the suggested method is to mount the target fs on another OS, if possible a live one, format the partition and then just extract/copy the data back. Since you aren't booting through that OS, you won't have any trouble backing it up, since devices node files and other special files won't be mounted at that time.