Monday, June 15, 2009

Converting Root Partition to ext4

Since I had updated the system to Fedora 11, the root filesystem was still ext3.
Boot directory is on a separate ext3 partition.

To get the maximum benefit of an ext4 system, I backed up the root. Reformatted it as ext4 and restored the backup.

The result - system would not boot. Booting into Ubuntu 9.04 and recreating the initrd after chroot to the Fedora 11 partition did not help.

I extracted the files in the initrd file and found that the change was simple. One line in 'init' file needed to be changed. The file system type had to be set to ext4 and the UUID changed to the current one.

mkrootdev -t ext4 -o defaults,noatime,nodiratime,ro UUID=6718a39a-2215-4e11-8716-455e7dcb11f4

Recreated the initrd file - remembering to use the cpio option -H newc

The system has been working fine.

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