That's good advice Mike.<br><br>It also means that if you wanted to boot up using a Live distro of some sort to fix things, you might find you don't have support either!<br><br>Spode<br><br clear="all">--<br><br>e-mail: <a href="mailto:spode@thinkabouttech.com">spode@thinkabouttech.com</a><br>
profile: <a href="http://thinkabouttech.com/account/1">thinkabouttech.com/account/1</a><br>skype: spodesabode<br>twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/spode">twitter.com/spode</a><br>m: +44 (0) 7886 588941<br>t: +44 (0) 2032 868064<br>
<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Michael E. Rentell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:michael.rentell@ntlworld.com">michael.rentell@ntlworld.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Good day all,<br>
<br>
The brighter ones amongst us will no doubt grin knowingly at this story,<br>
but those with a lesser knowledge might like to know that you need to be<br>
just a bit careful when upgrading to the ext4 filesystem.<br>
<br>
I upgraded to Mandriva 2009.1 over Mandriva 2008.1 (both the Powerpack<br>
version) and as a part of the upgrade it politely asked if it could<br>
upgrade my / and /home partitions to ext4 the new improved file system<br>
and I blithely clicked 'yes' without further thought.<br>
<br>
After trying 2009.1 for 2/3 weeks I yearned for the simplicity and<br>
reliability of 2008.1 and decided to go back to that. I'd reinstalled<br>
2008.1 several times previously and having a separate /home partition<br>
makes that dead easy.<br>
<br>
WRONG! As a part of the reinstallation of 2008.1 I noticed a slight<br>
change in the 'Which partition to format' routine. It just said that it<br>
was reformatting / rather than asking whether to reformat / and /home.<br>
So, anyway, I clicked 'yes'.<br>
<br>
DISASTER! It had not recognised the ext4 file system so it didn't know I<br>
had two partitions. It formatted the lot and I lost everything.<br>
<br>
I did have a backup but it was a bit out of date - yeah I know!<br>
<br>
So here's a friendly warning. If you upgrade to ext4 there's no going<br>
back gracefully. Also, keep up-to-date backups - disaster comes<br>
unexpectedly.<br>
<br>
Have a nice meeting today.<br>
<br>
MikeR<br>
in Folkestone<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>