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I was shocked to discover that converting one’s filesystem is simple as pie and totally safe. The process goes like this:

1. Remove cruft from your system (optional)
2. Reboot into a LiveCD environment (optional if the partition you want to convert can be mounted read-only without rebooting)
3. Mount the partition you want to convert in read-only mode
4. Copy the contents of the partition somewhere temporarily (ex. another partition, external drive, DVD, etc.)
5. Unmount the copied partition
6. Format the partition with your desired filesystem
7. Mount the formatted partition and copy all the files back
8. Edit /etc/fstab to reflect the new filesystem
9. Reboot and profit

Thanks to Slicehost’s wonderful Rescue Mode with a 2GB Rescue Slice, I was able to use this method to convert my Gentoo VPS from ext3 to XFS. Here’s a step-by-step account. These steps were performed on a 256MB VPS at Slicehost. YMMV.
Continue reading ‘Convert your Linux filesystem safely and easily (even on a VPS)’

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