I want to convert the file system on my boot drive from ext4 to btrfs.
I have converted by 2nd drive, unsure of how to convert the boot drive and partitions. Any help would be appreciated.
- I doubt it is possible (withouth backing up the data, reformating the partition and restoring the data).
- AFAIK Legacy Grub can not boot the kernel from a btrfs partition. I don’t see btrfs stage1.5 either.
This CT’ article was about openSUSE 11.3. I don’t think it has changed: Die Neuerungen von OpenSuse 11.3 | heise open
Standardmäßig verwendet OpenSuse 11.3 das Dateisystem Ext4, hat aber auch das experimentelle Dateisystem Btrfs im Angebot, das allerdings noch nicht offiziell unterstützt wird. Will man die Root-Partition mit Btrfs formatieren, muss man eine separate Boot-Partition verwenden, da Grub den Kernel von einer Btrfs-Partition nicht starten kann.
(My) translation: openSUSE 11.3 uses Ext4 filesystem by default, but also provides the experimental filesystem btrfs, which is not officially supported yet. If you want to format your root partition in btrfs, you have to use a separate boot partition, since Grub is not able to start the kernel from a btrfs partition.
Too bad, wonder if 12.1 will support it
btrfs is supported by GRUB2. And it IS available in 12.1 M5 as an option (although still it creates small ext4 boot partition).
But there is no problem to have btrfs root partition, although without fsck or good backups it would be quite risky.