Change Partition Type

[Basil Chupin]

On 23/10/2010 11:02, Mark wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Keith Clark
> <keithclark at waterloohosting.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Is it possible to change my partition on my USB drive from NTFS to ext3
>> or ext4 without losing data?
>>
>>      
> Sure - back it up, change the file system and restore the files!  :-)
>
> Seriously, why would you be using either NTFS or ext3 on a flash
> drive?  Neither one is particularly portable unless you NEVER use a
> system that doesn't understand your choice.  (OTOH, that *is* one way
> to secure a flash drive from use on Windoze machines....)
>    

I had my external USB drive formatted in both NTFS and ext3. Reason 
being that NTFS (or FAT32) does not recognise symlinks used in Linux OSs 
so if I wanted to backup some part of system which had symlinks I could 
only do it to an ext3(4) file system.

However, with Ubuntu my home directory does not contain any symlinks 
anymore (I don't install daily releases of Firefox, for example, so I 
don't need to have symlinks pointing to java, flash, and whatever); the 
external is therefore now formatted in NTFS because, once in a blue moon 
when I do run XP, I can store files >4GB on it.

BC

-- 
After two days in hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.
              W C Fields