I have installed 11.0 alongside vista successfully however, I want to get my 60Gb /home partition mountable in Windows using Ext2ifs. The only thing standing in the way is that it was formatted using inode blocks of 256bytes instead of 128, which this fs requires.
Assuming I am willing to sacrifice any performance/forward compatibility (did I see ext4 mentioned somewhere?) afforded by larger inodes, how would I go about reformatting a partition?
possibilities as I see it are:
boot from CD and reformat during a repair, then get it to set up user accounts again
boot into failsafe and do it via command, then repair from DVD,
boot into graphical interface and log in as root (which won’t have any files on the /home to make the UI die when I run
mkfs.ext3 -I 128
and erase all personal files).
I am not bothered about anything on the /home yet, (I don’t mind downloading my entire IMAP inbox again, and I haven’t moved any other old data across yet) assuming that by using zypper to install everything I have been putting it into the / partition.
Please inform me if I am insane and there is a really simple way to do this in administrator settings or something.
Switch to the console with Ctrl-Alt-F1 and login as root and then unmount /home and run mke2fs, then mount it again. You’ll have to recreate the user home directory and make it owned by the user.
I forgot to remount after the format, so my first attempt at copying the template failed and login just crashed, but all sorted now. and it mounts from windows!
By the way for anyone finding this thread useful later- I am not certain the code fragments for re-creating a home profile skeleton are accurate - I used
cp -a /etc/skel/. /home/joe
chmod -R joe:users /home/joe
however, I want to get my 60Gb /home partition mountable in Windows using Ext2ifs. The only thing standing in the way is that it was formatted using inode blocks of 256bytes instead of 128, which this fs requires.