[Klug-general] Be careful with ext4

[Michael E. Rentell]

Ah now there's a point I hadn't thought about.

Now happily working back on Mdv 2008.1 and with a full backup routine 
using grysnc as advised to in an earlier exchange.

That works and I feel much safer now.

MikeR

Andrew Miller (Spode) wrote:
> 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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>
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>
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Michael E. Rentell 
> <michael.rentell at ntlworld.com <mailto: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     I did have a backup but it was a bit out of date - yeah I know!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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