Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo from ext3 to ext4

[Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org>]

On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 08:48 -0800, reQuiem23 wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> i just had the idea to make a new ext4 partition (via mkfs.ext4) and copy
> (cp) my whole root-dir into that new partition, change the /etc/fstab, add
> an entry to the grub.conf and booting into that new partition. My /boot is
> on a separate ext3 partition, so this is not a problem. The kernel i use is
> gentoo-sources 2.6.28-r1 with ext4-support enabled. However, when i want to
> boot into my new system, the system starts, even the uvesafb starts, but
> than the booting process stops with a message like "tty starting" and the
> system reboots.
> 
> I removed all the files in /proc /dev and /sys, so probably this could be
> the cause of the problem. 

Yeah, you probably shouldn't have done that.  There are 'skeleton'
copies of /dev/ files in your root partition before udev kicks in and
those files are needed by the boot process (e.g. /dev/console).

What I recommend doing is:
      * boot into a livecd/usbstick
      * mount your root partition (ro) somewhere (e.g. /tmp/root
      * mount your empty destination partition somewhere
        (e.g. /tmp/newroot)
      * copy the files over to the new ext4 partition in whatever manner
      * reconfigure new fstab, grub.conf, etc and reboot.

For livecd/usb I always use RipLinux.  The latest version supports ext4
and has both 32- and 64-bit kernels.