[CentOS] Changing from NTFS to ext3

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 at 2:11pm, Florin Andrei wrote

> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>> On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 at 2:41pm, Mark Hull-Richter wrote
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> 'man mke2fs' has all the details.  I usually do:
>> 
>> mke2fs -b 4096 -j -m 1 -O dir_index $DEVICE
>
> What are the parameters used by the installer to format a partition?
> I believe it's simply "mke2fs -j $DEVICE" but I may be wrong.

Have a look with tune2fs (see below).  Default mke2fs behavior (on centos4 
at least) does *not* turn on dir_index, thus why I included it above. 
Also, mke2fs defaults to having the new filesystem checked every so many 
days or mounts, which anaconda turns off.  So a mke2fs should be followed 
by:

tune2fs -c0 -i0 $DEVICE

[jlb at chaos ~]$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/hda1
tune2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
Filesystem volume name:   /1
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          5679b769-446c-48f4-aea9-a72cfe61f38a
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index 
filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              1048576
Block count:              2096474
Reserved block count:     104823
Free blocks:              969847
Free inodes:              889498
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Reserved GDT blocks:      511
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         16384
Inode blocks per group:   512
Filesystem created:       Thu Sep 22 03:59:32 2005
Last mount time:          Thu Feb  8 12:36:33 2007
Last write time:          Thu Feb  8 12:36:33 2007
Mount count:              29
Maximum mount count:      -1
Last checked:             Thu Sep 22 03:59:32 2005
Check interval:           0 (<none>)
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:               128
Journal inode:            8
First orphan inode:       776382
Default directory hash:   tea
Directory Hash Seed:      1c2cefd8-ed4a-49f0-9048-1de30d1ac4b6
Journal backup:           inode blocks


-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University