How do I change from ext3 to ext2?

[Gerry Doris]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Jerry McBride wrote:

> 
> > Gerry Doris wrote:
> > I want to do some disk rearranging and it would be really convenient if my 
> > partition were ext2 instead of ext3.
> > 
> 
> >From the EXT3.FAQ
> 
> Q: How do I convert my ext3 partition back to ext2?
> 
> Actually there is only little need to do so, because in most cases it is
> sufficient to mount the partition explicitely as ext2. But if you really need to
> convert your partion back to ext2 just do the following on an umounted
> partition:    tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hdaX
> 
> To be on the safe side you should force a fsck run on this partition
> afterwards:    fsck.ext2 -f /dev/hdaX
> 
> After this procedure you can safely delete the .journal file if there was any. 
> 

Hmmm, it doesn't work that way on my Redhat 8.0 system.  It looks like the 
Redhat stock kernel has the ext3 file system hardcoded.  Even after I've 
changed the partitions back to ext2 the kernel still tries to load them as 
ext3 and then panics.

I even changed the fstab entries to ext2 but it doesn't matter whether 
they're set to ext2 or ext3.  If the partitions are ext3 the kernel will 
mount them.  It panics otherwise.

This is on a dual boot system and I was going to use Partition Magic's
DriveCopy to copy the entire drive all at once to a new drive.  Problem is
that my copy of DriveCopy doesn't understand ext3.

Perhaps I can just change the partitions to ext2, let DriveCopy copy the
entire disk to the new one, and then change them back to ext3 so 
everything will work again?

-- 
Gerry

"The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne"  Chaucer