Downgrading from ext4 to ext3

[homemadejam]

Hey,
Is there any way of downgrading from ext4 back to ext3?

Thanks in advice,
Jam

[ajcham]

I believe that would involve a reformat of your disk, so you would have to back up anything you want to keep.

[stefangr1]

Hey,
Is there any way of downgrading from ext4 back to ext3?

Thanks in advice,
Jam

If I may ask, why do you want to downgrade?

[homemadejam]

Well, I've upgraded to ext4.. but I cannot boot it up.

I have a 2nd partition which I have a 2nd copy of Ubuntu installed onto there...

So I have instaled Grub2, and added my ext4 partiton on there.

I still had no luck in booting it up...
And I read somewhere that I had to add a fwe thigns into the initramfs moudles... ext4, jbd2 & crc16 (I think).

But still no luck.
Someone said that my placing a custom script telling it what to mount and where into scripts/local-bottom would work.. still no luck.

I have also added things like rootfstype=ext4 into the Grub... but nope.

So I have had enough of trying to get it to work.. I just want to be able to use it again.

Thanks,
Jam

[homemadejam]

I can mount my ext4 partition from my other spare partition... is there any way in which I can copy all my files over to my 2nd partition.. format my 1st (back to ext3) and then move all my files back?

Thanks,
Jam

[cariboo]

The answer to your question is yes. I may be an good idea to do this soon, as I am seeing reports of data loss in the Jaunty Testing and Discussion Forum.

Jim

[PeterLohmann]

So can I just tar my / into one big tarfile, delete the ext4 partition, recreate it as ext3 and untar everything back? Will this be ok for all the special and device files on the root partition?

My reason for going back to ext3 is the lack of backup tools for ext4 as I would like to use something like dump or at least partimage.