Want to install FreeBSD - need advice on Writable filesystems?

[Aditya Sarawgi]

On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 08:01:56AM -0400, samankaya at netscape.net wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> This is my first post and first time on a mailing list for a very long time :)
> 
> I am just about to switch my Debian Linux install over to a dual boot between Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and FreeBSD 7.2.
> 
> Currently my setup is as follows:
> 
> hda1 - ext3 
> hdb1 - ext3 Linux root /
> hdb2 - ext3 Linux home /home
> 
> Because of the lack of space in my network and the fact that the master IDE drive is 250GB and the slave IDE drive is 160GB I wanted to wipe / on hdb1 and reformat to UFS2 and install FreeBSD.
> 
> However would I be able to then write to UFS of Solaris as I will reformat the master to UFS for SXCE. I read on a forum already that BSD cannot write to ext3 only ext2 and if it did write to ext3 it would be without the journal. So I am not sure if writing to ext3 from BSD is a good idea either? 
> 
> The plan though at least is to write to UFS so that I can I can just bounce my data back and forth, so when it comes down to reformatting the ext3 /home partition I won't loose any of my information!
> 
> I do not have a SAN or NAS system or even enough space in my servers for NFS transfer which is why I need to take these measures in the first place.....
> 
> I hope someone has a response for my dilemma - many thanks,
> 
> Kaya 
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Yes currently journaling is not supported by ext2fs but you can read & write safely if the inode size of your ext2/ext3  partition is 128. If the 
inode size is different from 128 (which is common nowdays) then you can use the following patch http://pflog.net/~floyd/ext2fs.diff 


Cheers,
Aditya Sarawgi