Arch Linux

nss

Member

Registered: 2007-05-08

Posts: 24

upgrade ext3 -> ext4 without reinstalling

I am considering upgrading my partitions from ext3 to ext4. Without reading into this much, I'm thinking of booting from a live CD or usb and doing something like the following (where sda is the drive containing the partitions I want to upgrade and sdb is a temporary backup drive):

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/root
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup
# rsync -av /mnt/root/ /mnt/backup
# rsync -avn /mnt/root/ /mnt/backup
# umount /mnt/root
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/root
# rsync -av /mnt/backup/ /mnt/root
# rsync -avn /mnt/backup/ /mnt/root
# vim /mnt/root/etc/fstab                 <---- change ext3's to ext4's
# umount /mnt/root
# umount /mnt/backup
# reboot

For all I know, this could be a nonsensical approach. Is there something I'm missing or will this work? I have a feeling it's the former.

Last edited by nss (2009-01-26 21:47:03)

kevin89

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2007-03-14

Posts: 218

Re: upgrade ext3 -> ext4 without reinstalling

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ext … t3_to_ext4

Wiki ftw!

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: upgrade ext3 -> ext4 without reinstalling

If you do move your data off then back on again, all of your files will use the newer features of ext4. If you don't, they won't until they're changed the next time. I didn't move my data to a different drive, but I did use the CK defrag script on most of my data. Details can be found here in the following link. It may be helpful to start backwards; It's a long, involved thread with a simple ending:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=61602