> > Well after fighting with this I finaly got it to work. It's not
> > sufficient to just remove the journal and remount as ext2. The boot image
> > loads support for ext3 and jbd and then complains that it can't find a
> > journal file, kernel panic.
> >
> > I had to boot from CD, linux rescue, vi the
> > /lib/modules/2.4.9-13/modules.dep and remove EXT3 & JBD. Then mkinitrd a
> > new /boot/initrd-2.4.9-13.img.
>
> What a crap idea. What happened with the `tune2fs' command? Why did it
> think any journal was required if you were mounting as ext2?!
>
> ~Tim

No one want to do things the hard way. He did it because he had to.

yes. mount it as ext2. it's fully backwards compatible, though of course you won't get the journalling features.

[snip]
> If drive image 5.0 recognises ext2, in principle ext3
> shouldn't have made any difference.

You might still need to change a few flags in the superblock - things expecting ext2 don't always cope with ext3 just because it's *compatible*.

~Tim

> > You might still need to change a few flags in the superblock
>
> You might. I would be wary of continuing to use some magic tool on my
> partitions that was evidently incompatible with the FS. Cart before the
> horse if you start deciding that your DOS programs are the measure of
> what ext2 looks like.

Well, the tune2fs -O"^has_journal" that I suggested earlier was there to overcome exactly this problem. It's been known to flush all the ext3- specific bits in my superblocks before now.

I wouldn't worry, anyway; I've been known to fling filesystems around between ext2, ext3, reiserfs and XFS (massive copying across, obviously) with much abandon before now :8)

~Tim