Adam, On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 05:32, Alexander Dalloz wrote: > Am Di, den 10.02.2004 schrieb Adam Cooper um 11:16: > > On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 09:58, Alexander Dalloz wrote: > > > Hello? Why on earth is /usr/local a vfat (fat32 presumably) formatted? > > > vfat does not know anything about symlinks, it's NO LINUX filesystem. > > > Exactly that I assumed in my previous posting yesterday. > > > > Yep I suppose that could be the problem :-|. I apologise for innate > > stupidity. This i suppose leads me onto my final question. > > It is your problem. Probably just ignorance. Ignorance can be fixed, stupid is forever. ;^) > > How can I reformat to ext3 without losing all the data on /usr/local/? > > Can I do it without a re-install? It's taken me a week to get the > > computer sorted and I don't really want to have to go through it all > > again. > > Switch to runlevel 1 by entering "init 1", then copy the content of > /usr/local to a different place on your disk, umount /dev/hda7, format > the partition with ext3, edit /etc/fstab to fit the new filesystem, > mount /dev/hda7, push back the previously copied data to /usr/local. > Done. You now can go back to your standard runlevel, might be 5 as you > use X, by entering "init 5". If you have room on / you could save a step, possibly increase efficiency, and save /dev/sda7 for other uses, by going to runlevel 1, then: mkdir /usr/new_local cp -a /usr/local/* /usr/new_local umount /dev/hda7 rmdir /usr/local mv /usr/new_local /usr/local Then edit fstab to mount /dev/sda7 as desired. You may want to leave it as vfat at another mount point until you verify all is OK, or perhaps permanently if you want to multi-boot and exchange things with your M$ OS on /dev/hda1. For example, make the fstab line: /dev/hda7 /exchange vfat defaults 0 0 Then: mkdir /exchange mount -a </Aside: The /windows line looks weird. Is it working? Perhaps it is: /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro,noauto,users,gid=501,umask=0227 0 0 Rather than /dev/hda1/mnt /windows ntfs ro,noauto,users,gid=501,umask=0227 0 0 as shown earlier, and presumably you have a kernel/module for ntfs loaded. Aside./> Alternatively, just in case it is not obvious, to format as ext3: mke2fs -j /dev/hda7 Make fstab line: /dev/hda7 /exchange ext3 defaults 1 2 mkdir /exchange mount -a Good luck with your education in Linux. Phil
