[Klug-general] Be careful with ext4

[Michael E. Rentell]

Good day all,

The brighter ones amongst us will no doubt grin knowingly at this story, 
but those with a lesser knowledge might like to know that you need to be 
just a bit careful when upgrading to the ext4 filesystem.

I upgraded to Mandriva 2009.1 over Mandriva 2008.1 (both the Powerpack 
version) and as a part of the upgrade it politely asked if it could 
upgrade my / and /home partitions to ext4 the new improved file system 
and I blithely clicked 'yes' without further thought.

After trying 2009.1 for 2/3 weeks I yearned for the simplicity and 
reliability of 2008.1 and decided to go back to that. I'd reinstalled 
2008.1 several times previously and having a separate /home partition 
makes that dead easy.

WRONG! As a part of the reinstallation of 2008.1 I noticed a slight 
change in the 'Which partition to format' routine. It just said that it 
was reformatting / rather than asking whether to reformat / and /home. 
So, anyway, I clicked 'yes'.

DISASTER! It had not recognised the ext4 file system so it didn't know I 
had two partitions. It formatted the lot and I lost everything.

I did have a backup but it was a bit out of date - yeah I know!

So here's a friendly warning. If you upgrade to ext4 there's no going 
back gracefully. Also, keep up-to-date backups - disaster comes 
unexpectedly.

Have a nice meeting today.

MikeR
in Folkestone