GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 353065
convert partitions from between filesystems and other advanced features
Last modified: 2012-03-12 17:24:33 UTC
I'd like to be able to convert FAT32 to NTFS to ext2 and back again without losing any data or filenames. If there are filename incompatabilities, obviously gparted should tell me which files are problematic. In the case of filesystems with incompatible features - like extra data forks on NTFS -> FAT32, gparted would have to have an option to allow lossy operations, which would turn on prompting in those cases (otherwise it would just error out). Another advanced feature I'd like would be to merge filesystems (of the same and or different types). Obviously, gparted would need to detect conflicting files. Also, support for more of the exotic filesystems would be good - BeFS, vmware images and so on. All the above is obviously very low priority, something to think about when all the crosses in the feature table are complete :)
well, that convert has been on the list for a while. I was thinking about using something like this http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/ It claims it can convert virtually all filesystems in any other filesystem. Implementing it shouldn't take much time, but testing it, finding its powers and limitations will.. If you do the testing, i'll implement it.
convertfs sounds interesting, even though I was thinking more of conversion algorithms that understand the structure of filesystems rather than the sparse trick (I don't know if any of these exist, but they would be cool). I'm away from Sept 4 to the end of the year, but I can help test after that.
GParted is mostly a front end to libparted, and many other file system tools. Hence to support converting partitions from one file system to another, GParted would rely on an external file system tool. Since development on convertfs (http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/) appears to have stopped in 2005, do you have another tool to suggest for converting file systems? If not then I suggest we close this feature request as "WONTFIX".
I agree with that, closing for now. Please reopen this request if a project that is maintained can do this.
I am the author of 'fstransform', a program with similar goals as 'convertfs'. I am working on integrating it with gparted, for details please see "Bug 671784 - enhancement: convert partitions from one file system to another". Probably this bug could be reopened, or maybe simply redirected to Bug 671784.
To indicate that work has begun anew on this request, but with fstransform instead of fsconvert, I am marking this report as a duplicate of the fstransform bug report. In this way anyone tracking the status of this bug report will now see it marked as a duplicate of the actively worked on bug report. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 671784 ***