How do I change from ext3 to ext2?

[Kurt Wall]

Feigning erudition, Gerry Doris wrote:
% 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.

This will happen if your kernel lacks support for ext2 or fails to
load the ext2 module at boot time. What is the output of 
"cat /proc/filesystems"? You should see ext2 in there.

% 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.

Please post the contents of /etc/fstab and the output of 
"debugfs -R feature /dev/hdXN" where X is the disk in question and N 
is the partition number. Thus, for example:

# debugfs -R feature /dev/sda1
debugfs 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Filesystem features: has_journal filetype needs_recovery sparse_super
# debugfs -R feature /dev/hdc1
debugfs 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Filesystem features: sparse_super
#

Kurt
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