[11.04]-Convert HDD From EXT4 To NTFS Without Data Lose ???

[Karl Auer]

Jesse Palser <SLNTHERO <at> AOL.com> writes:
> How would I convert a hard drive
> from EXT4 to Microsoft NTFS
> without data lose and formatting?

At the end of such a process, a partition formatted as EXT4 has been
transformed into an partition formatted as NTFS, so on the face of it
your request doesn't make sense. It would in theory be possible to
reformat in place, copying and preserving data as you go, but not with
standard tools. That said, you might be able to find in-place format
conversion tools (probably proprietary) - have you already asked Google?

There used to be a tool called anyconvertfs that converted between
various formats, but I just checked and it doesn't look maintained any
more.

GParted is pretty powerful - I don't think it can convert in place, but
what it definitely CAN do is shrink and resize partitions of various
types. So if you have the disk space you could shrink the EXT4
partition, format the remainder as NTFS and copy across.

All of the above said, however, it would still be WAY safer for you to
take a backup of all the files on your EXT4 partition (maybe two backups
on two different disks if the data is especially valuable), then
reformat EXT4 to NTFS and restore the files to the newly formatted
partition.

Reason: If you try to convert in place and something goes wrong, total
data loss is pretty much certain.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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