How do I change from ext3 to ext2?

[Jerry McBride]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 22:04:00 -0500 (EST) Gerry Doris <gerry at dorfam.ca> 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.
> 

Hmmm... now the fog lifts... In this red hat kernel, is ext2 a module or also
compiled into the kernel? If it's a module, this will never work... as the ext2
module has to in the kernel prior to booting into an ext2 file system.

So, recompile your current kernel and compile in both ext2 and ext3 (they live
together quite nicely) and you should them be able to swap file systems back and
forth at will. 

Sorry for not picking up on this in my previous posting, I'm on some rather
powerful pain killers at the moment and it's tough to keep a clear thought.

-- 

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