Thanks to all the good advice here, I made the switch to ext3. It was quite painless, was neither doable nor necessitating a CD-boot. Just did the tune2fs -j and edited the fstab and rebooted. Note that on boot now, I get a warning something like: ext2 loader warning, ext3 superblock ..... mounted ext3, filesystem ext2. Besides this, runs perfectly and survived one switch off with a flawless fsck.