Thursday, December 9, 2010

Howto Convert Ext3 filesystem to Ext4 Filesystem without Reinstalling OS in Fedora/CentOS/Ubuntu

Things to remember

  • Unmount the filesystem before convert
  • Filesystem must be non-root
This way you can improve the performance, storage limits and features of your existing filesystem without reformatting and/or reinstalling your OS and softwares.
First, unmount the partition: umount /dev/sda2 (change sda2 with your Drive)
Next, run a filesystem check on it to make sure it is in sane condition.
fsck.ext3 -pf /dev/sda2
Enable new features of ext4 on the filesystem
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index  /dev/sda2
Run a filesystem check. to make sure that the filesystem is now clean.
fsck -pf /dev/sda2
Now edit your /etc/fstab file and replace "ext3" with "ext4" for /dev/sda1. Other options may differ for your system.
/dev/sda2  /disk ext4 defaults 0 2
Try to mount your new ext4 filesystem: mount /disk

No comments: