Re: A "magical" HDD formatting question.
On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
<bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> On Friday 09 July 2010 00:53:55 Sthu Deus wrote:
>> Is there a way to:
>>
>> . boot from internal HDD then
>>
>> . chroot or whatever to externel HDD (with the same Debian clone
>> copy)
>>
>> . format the internal HDD,
>
> pivot_root is supposed to do this in a way that allows you to umount the old
> '/' cleanly. It is used in modern initramfs.
>
>> . move the OS back from external to internal HDD?
>>
>> I have to do so because it is impossible for now to boot from CD/USB.
>> And I want to move from ext3 to ext4.
>
> You can use some of the ext4 features on a existing file system by using
> tune2fs to turn them on. That would eliminate the need for a "format" and re-
> install.
You can use all of an ext4's features on an ext2/ext3 system / upgrade
an ext2/ext3 filesystem to ext4 with tune2fs.
For example for / (assuming that it is sda1)
init 1
mount -o remount,ro /
fsck.ext2 -pf /dev/sda1
tune2fs -O [has_journal,]large_file,huge_file,extents,dir_index,uninit_bg
/dev/sda1
fsck.ext2 -fD /dev/sda1
init 6
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