Monday, March 20, 2017

upgrade - Changing filesystem types "safely"


Back in Windows 95 OSR2 (I believe), there was a conversion tool that would take your extant FAT16 partition and change it to FAT32 non-destructively (most of the time).


Are there any tools like that now for going from one file system type to another in situ without destroying the data?


Examples: from etx3 to ext4? Or NTFS to XFS?


Answer



For ext3 to ext4 you can use:


tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/yourfilesystem


followed by:


fsck -pDf /dev/yourfilesystem


To return the system to a consistent state. However, I don't believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that this is a complete conversion. I believe there may be an issue with extents...


For FAT to NTFS:


convert (your drive letter here): /fs:ntfs


NTFS to XFS I have no idea but I would doubt it. NTFS is proprietary...


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