[plug] Upgrade filesystem

[Craig Ringer]

James Devenish wrote:
> In message <1071412126.1743.5.camel at syngery>
> on Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:28:46PM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> 
>>So my real question is what is the best way to upgrade the file system
>>to EXT3 once I have upgrade the kernel?
> 
> 
> Assuming you don't have an initrd-style system (I don't even know what
> that is),

A system with a two stage boot process, where the initial root 
filesystem is a ramdisk loaded into memory by the bootloader. The initrd 
(initial ramdisk) is responsible for loading the required modules and 
setting things up, then mounting the real root fs. A command called 
'pivot_root' is then used to make the newly mounted root-to-be the real 
root. The initrd is then unmounted and freed.

Many distros use this to allow the use of a single kernel image for both 
ATA and SCSI based systems while keeping kernel sizes reasonable. You 
could also do cool things like a kerberos-secured nfsv4 root filesystem 
using an initrd I expect.

> then it's just the usual for you, I imagine. Something along
> the lines of:
> 
>  - tune2fs -j /path/to/dev (for each fs to be changed)
>  - change ext2 to ext3 in /etc/fstab

You'll want to rebuild your initrd if you're using a stock debian 
kernel. 'mkinitrd' comes to mind.

>  - reboot

Craig Ringer