Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Finally! Approximately 28 hours after I started I finally got my laptop’s root filesystem to be XFS. Yay! Here’s a quick summary of what I did:

1. boot with init=/bin/bash
2. make sure that / is mounted read-only
3. mount my external firewire drive read-write
4. use dd to copy the entire root partition to a file on the external disk
5. run sha1sum on the disk image and the partition (just to make sure that I got everything exactly the way it is)
6. reboot into knoppix/other live CD (I happened to have a copy of SLAX)
7. mkfs.xfs the partition
8. mount the partition, and the disk image (using -o loop=/dev/loop9)
9. cp -a the files from the disk image to the partition
10. chroot to the new partition
11. edit /etc/fstab to reflect new filesystem type
12. run grub to install the new stage 1.5
13. reboot, and enjoy the new filesystem

It is rather simple procedure. The thing that made it take so long (instead of ~3-4 hours) was the fact that GRUB didn’t want to work. It took me more than a day to figure out that downgrading grub to 0.91-2 would do the trick.