[Klug-general] Be careful with ext4

[Andrew Miller (Spode)]

That's good advice Mike.

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!

Spode

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On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Michael E. Rentell <
michael.rentell at ntlworld.com> wrote:

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 I did have a backup but it was a bit out of date - yeah I know!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