I have just made an backup of my old data in NTFS partition in my laptop. So, it is a good time to format that partition into ext3. In my case, the partition is a logical partition inside Win95 extended partition (f or W95 Ext'd (LBA)) while itself is NTFS (8 or HPFS/NTFS). In summary, my partition table is as follow.

/dev/hda1   Linux
/dev/hda2   W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5   HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6   Linux swap / Solaris

At the end of this transformation, I expect to have as below.

/dev/hda1   Linux
/dev/hda2   Linux extended
/dev/hda5   Linux
/dev/hda6   Linux swap / Solaris

Below is my instructions.

1. Deactivate the swap

   swapoff -a
   

2. Delete /dev/hda2

3. Add /dev/hda2 as Linux extended
4. Add /dev/hda5
5. Add /dev/hda6
6. Change partition type of /dev/hda6 to 82 or Linux swap / Solaris
7. Write the partition
8. Reboot to take effect

9. Format /dev/hda5 to ext3

   mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda5
   

10. Format /dev/hda6 to Linux swap

    mkswap /dev/hda6
    

11. Activate the swap partition

    swapon -a
    

12. Mount /dev/hda5 on boot by adding below line to /etc/fstab

    /dev/hda5       /media/data     ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
    

13. Mount that partition

    mount -a
    

You might try to reboot again to make sure everything works just fine.

Tags: linux, ext3, swap