Problem with 'mount' - advice please.

[Calum]

hello.
i just installed basiclinux 1.8 on a computer that already has mandrake and red hat on ext3 partitions, and freeDOS on a fat16 partition.
I have no problem mounting the fat16 partition, but it seems i can't mount the ext3 partitions as ext3 or as ext2. How can i change my ext3 partitions to being ext2 partitions without losing any of the data on them if possible please? Or even better, how do i add support for ext3 to basiclinux?

I downloaded the utils.tgz package for slackware 7.1 and installed it, which updated my copy of 'mount' and i thought that would fix it but it didn't. and i just tried to activate my swap partition and was told that my kernel doesn't support swap partitions (which is odd because i am following the instructions for swap partitions that came with basiclinux...) - i suppose the next thing is to recompile my kernel.

so can anybody offer me a hand with these interesting mounting problems? for information, basiclinux is a 3MB or so sized distro based on slackware 7.1 and busybox 0.6.

Thanks in advance!

[Doogee]

isnt there some make2fs or mk2fs or something?

[flap]

I'm assuming BasicLinux has a pre 2.4 kernel so it won't support ext3. I really don't see why you'd want to downgrade your fs from ext3 to ext2 just to get basiclinux to work, if you already have rh and mandrake running. Surely the point of BL is to install it on very old systems that won't run anything else?

Anyway, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/sct/ext3/README has instructions on how you can change from ext3 to ext2 with fsdebug.

[Calum]

hello, yes it includes mke2fs, but i didn't think of it since i thought it would erase the partition's contents.

as for my reasons, i am doing this on my 'learning' computer where i am trying to make various free operating systems of different walks of life play nice together as a learning excercise.

thanks for the link btw!