Mark Hull-Richter spake the following on 3/16/2007 11:41 AM:
I want to convert all my NTFS partitions to ext3 since I’m no longer running Windows, at least on my main machine at home. I’m planning to tar the NTFS partitions to an existing ext3, reformat the partition as ext3 and untar it back.
What is the best way to accomplish step two of this – reformatting the partition? I’ve only done this so far during the installation phase, and that was for partitions I knew I could destroy with impunity. I’m guessing I unmount the drive, <do something magic here> and remount it. It’s the magic part I don’t know.
Thanks.
How much data do you actually need from the ntfs partitions? There is no use keeping everything, as most of it will be useless to linux. Is there some room on the drive for an extra partition? You could create a fat32 partition large enough to hold the data you want to keep, and dump the rest.