[FC5] Change file system & merge drive without lossing data???

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 05:22:47PM +0100, Vijay Gill wrote:
> On 17/10/06, Deepak Shrestha <d88pak at gmail.com> wrote:
> >I have one 40GB drive and this is where I have my FC5 installed.
> >Besides, I have another drive 30GB drive, which I partitioned into
> >20GB(movies) and 10GB(mp3) vfat (FAT32) filesystem. It is almost full.
> >Obviously the reason for VFAT is so that I can use it with Windows
> >machine but I want to change the file system of this drive to ext3 and
> >merge them into one partition (single drive single partition) to use
> >it solely with my FC5.
> >
> >====================
> >20GB + 10GB = 30GB single drive and (ext3 file system)
> >====================
> >
> >I know backing up is the good practice but I have no extra drive to
> >backup my files. So may be I need to change this first two drive into
> >ext3 and then merge them together.
> >
> >is it possible what I am thinking of???
> >
> Backing up to another media, converting the filesystem and restoring
> is the only way AFAIK. I wanted to do the same some time ago and could
> not find any tool to do so. The tools you mentioned help in
> partitioning/resiging partitions but do not help in the current
> scenario.

I have no idea whether this actually works, and it is risky under any
circumstances, however you may want to look at the following.  It
won't help you merge the two file systems without substantial work,
since you need to be concerned about overlapping inode numbers, etc.:


http://anyfs-tools.sourceforge.net/

anyfs-tools - toolset for recovering and converting filesystems and
              recovering data from a block device.

...

Convert filesystems

    anyfs-tools anyfs-tools allows a user to convert filesystems. There
    is only one requirement for the existing source filesystem: there
    must be FIBMAP system call ioctl(2) support in the filesystem driver
    (maybe read-only) for Linux OS.

    Currently anyfs-tools supports filesystem conversion to ext2fs/ext3fs
    or xfs, but it's hoped that in future there will be other filesystem
    building support. For this to happen, there must first be interest
    from filesystem maintainers and developers. The advantage of
    anyfs-tools is that it is a convenient tool and does not require
    much free space for saving of all of the meta-data for files ably
    increase the number of users of a particular supported filesystem.

    Generally, the steps to convert an existing filesystem are as follows:

    1) build_it for reading all informaton about the physical location
       of files on a disk and file access permissions, then saving that
       information to an external inode table.

    2) maybe anyfs driver for clear some space for new filesystem.

    3) maybe reblock for changing filesystem blocksize where the
       destination filesystem doesn't support the same blocksize as the
       source one.

    4) Finally, build a filesystem by using build_e2fs or build_xfs.

    The whole converting process maybe automated with using the
    anyconvertfs script.

Regards,

	Bill Rugolsky