[CentOS] Re: What's the best way to convert a whole set of filesystems?

Wed Mar 14 23:37:55 UTC 2007
Mark Hull-Richter <mhull-richter at datallegro.com>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Scott Silva
> Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 4:29 PM
> To: centos at centos.org
> Subject: [CentOS] Re: What's the best way to convert a whole set of
> filesystems?
> 
> Are you replacing XP? If so, back up the files you want to keep (a cd
> should
> hold it all if you zip it first if there are many small files),
install
> linux,
> and restore the files from cd.
> 
I have fairly recent backups of most everything on DVDs (remember, we're
talking somewhere between 100Gb and 200Gb of disk space to back up and
restore), but I need to catch the latest stuff that isn't on DVD yet.

I was thinking to copy each partition to the new /home one at a time,
reformat the original (from NTFS to ext3) and then copy back.  That
makes sense to me except for the plain text files (which should be
converted from dos to unix format), but I could do that afterwards.

It would probably be horrendously slow with cp - what would be a better
way: tar, cpio, or dd, or something else?