changing filesystem format from xfs to ext4 without losing data

Posted by A.Rashad on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by A.Rashad
Published on 2010-05-28T04:25:32Z Indexed on 2010/06/01 11:54 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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ubuntu

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xfs

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ext4

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jfs

I have a fresh Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) running on a laptop. where I defined the filesystems as:

mount point / on ext4 (46 Gb)
mount point /home on jfs (63 GB)
swap as 3 Gb

I left the machine over night to do some task, without AC power supply. next day in the morning I found it on standby, task completed, but filesystem was not reachable. it gave me I/O error

it seems that there is a problem with jfs and standby.

anyways, to avoid any hassle, I want to move this mount point from jfs format to ext4.

can I do this without losing data and without the need to place the data in a temporary location until transformation is done?

sorry to mention that, but I recall back in the windows days, we would change a FAT16 to FAT32 or a FAT32 to NTFS without having to lose the data. I hope this is available on Linux.

Update The /home filesystem was xfs not jfs, and it seems there is a bug with this filesystem for some reason, I had to re-install the OS twice until I ended up with ext4 for the entire /

However, as a conclusion, it seems that there is no way to make a conversion

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