On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 05:22:47PM +0100, Vijay Gill wrote: > On 17/10/06, Deepak Shrestha <d88pak@xxxxxxxxx> 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
