One of the most interesting features we have come with the latest edition of Ubuntu is ext4 disk format. We have seen examples of how you can injure to affect the access time to data stored on our disks with ext4. If you do not want to have to reinstall Ubuntu to make use of this improvement we can convert our partition with the following steps.

Steps to convert.

You must be updated to version Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. If you think you keep important information on the disc should consider making a backup of important files. You do not have to spend anything, but if the information is worth it you should not take the risk.

Start up from a bootable CD containing Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. Once we are in the gnome desktop open a terminal from Applications → Accessories → Terminal.

We become root with:

sudo -i

Thereby simplify the introduction of commands.
We identify the partition you want to convert:

fdisk -l

and we see something like:

fdisk-l

From what we deduce that the boot partition is / dev/sda1, and this route will we use the following commands.

We proceed to convert the partition to ext4 with the following command. The parameter we use is a capital O, not zero or one or lowercase.

tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda1

Check disk integrity with:

e2fsck -pf /dev/sda1

It is normal for us an error report.

We mount the partition.

mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /mnt

And open to edit the fstab which is housed in the converted disk.

gedit /mnt/etc/fstab

Look something like the following:

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=e8113d8a-18c6-4cf8-9055-6cc97e0f4128 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

And where it says change ext3 to ext4

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=e8113d8a-18c6-4cf8-9055-6cc97e0f4128 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

and maintain. We can restart.

Sometimes you see a fatal error (error 13) which is caused by misallocation in the grub. Resolved starting with the CD of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and running from a terminal:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo grub-install /dev/sda --root-directory=/mnt --recheck

End

Completed this process will have become the newest format partition to ext4. One feature is the total ext4 ext3 compatibility which makes convert from one to another so easy. The files hosted on our album before the conversion process will not benefit from the features of ext4. Only new files do. You can copy these files to another disk and re-pass the converted disk to ext4 with what then if they benefit from new features.

Have been reported some problems with ext4 and data loss but as we read in the blog of Diego Calleja is a completely alarmist information.