[CentOS] Changing from NTFS to ext3

[Mark Hull-Richter]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of John Summerfield
> Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 2:44 PM
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Changing from NTFS to ext3
> 
> mke2fs is not a partitioning tool, it's for creating filesystems.

For the record, what I did was as follows.  For each partition I had
that was FAT32 or NTFS (I have one finishing, I hope, now, and one left
to go), I did the following:

cd /mnt/X	# where X was the partition corresponding to WXP drive X
tar cvf <elsewhere>/X.tar *
cd ..
umount /dev/<X's-dev>
fdisk -l	# to verify the partition map - they were all ok
# actually, for one of the partitions I found some unused space I had
set
# aside long ago and used fdisk to merge the two partitions.
mke2fs -b 4096 -j -m 1 -O dir_index /dev/<X's-dev>
umount /dev/<X's-fellow-partitions-on-the-same-disk>
# For the boot drive partitions I couldn't do this and had to reboot
# after the fdisk
fdisk		# to set the partition type to Linux from HTFS/NTFS
vi /etc/fstab	# to fix the entry for X
mount -a
cd /mnt/X
tar xvf <elsewhere>/X.tar

Then I changed the ownerships and permissions to I (the main user) owned
and had full access to all of them.  Since there were no Linux
executables or shell scripts in any of the old Windows partitions, this
was simple.

Thanks for all your help, everyone - I am now a CentOS devotee.

mhr