Posted: 2005-12-19 06:56, Edited: 2005-12-19 12:56
This is something I had to look up for someone... For all partitions, other than the root partition / and the boot partition /boot, you need to unmount the partition, run the tunefs command to create the journal file and then change the fstab file to reflect that the partitions is now ext3.
The commands might be something like this:
umount /dev/hdaXX
tune2fs -j /dev/hdaXX
Note: If you are converting the /usr partition you need to remount it in read-only mode (e.g mount -o remount,ro /usr) before running tunefs as the tunefs binary is on that partition and obviously needs to remain available to run it.
You should now edit the /etc/fstab file and change ext2 to ext3 for hdaXX. After that you need to remount the partition.
mount /dev/hdaXX
Note: hdaXX should be replaced with the partition you are working on, e.g. /dev/hda5.
Then reboot and check that the new partition is mounted using as ext3.
I hope that is a useful tip!
THP