I've been migrating my system from btrfs to ext4 after running into performance issues with VMs. I have two hard drives in my laptop to work with. I've successfully moved my home partition, but the same steps I used aren't working for root.
Progress so far:
I've dd
'd my root partition from /dev/sda3
into /dev/sdb3
. I modified /etc/fstab
to the following:
$ cat /etc/fstab
#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# UUID=95f13c34-96ca-49e3-bcb2-ff594df31506
/dev/sdb3 / btrfs rw,noatime,ssd,space_cache,discard 0 0
# UUID=0fe04f59-599f-41e2-ac30-2ad0f17a9727
/dev/sda2 /boot ext2 rw,relatime 0 2
# UUID=44741e0f-924a-4841-80ef-2132bef84182
/dev/sda4 /home ext4 rw,noatime,discard 0 0
and run sudo mkinitcpio -p linux
. It seems to work. I'm able to boot by mounting the partition on the second disk. df
shows:
$ df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 28G 18G 9.8G 65% /
So, clearly, sdb3
is mounted, not sda3
. Here's the problematic step: When I try to format sda3
, which is supposedly unused, I get the following:
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
[sudo] password for stew:
mke2fs 1.42.11 (09-Jul-2014)
/dev/sda3 contains a btrfs file system
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
/dev/sda3 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here!
sda3
is in use. How and why could it possibly be in use?
As per casey's comment, the output of mount:
mount | grep sd
/dev/sdb3 on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,ssd,discard,space_cache)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,discard,data=ordered)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext2 (rw,relatime)
As per Warwick's comment, unmounting:
$ sudo umount /dev/sda3
umount: /dev/sda3: not mounted
Mounting and umounting sda3 elsewhere works successfully, but changes nothing.
Update: More fishy behavior:
$ mount | grep sd
/dev/sdb3 on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,ssd,discard,space_cache)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,discard,data=ordered)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext2 (rw,relatime)
$ sudo mount /dev/sda3 mnt
[sudo] password for stew:
$ mount | grep sd
/dev/sda3 on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,ssd,discard,space_cache)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,discard,data=ordered)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext2 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sda3 on /home/stew/mnt type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,discard,space_cache)
After mounting sda3, sdb3 is no longer mounter. Weird, huh?
As per mikeserv:
$ rmmod btrfs
rmmod: ERROR: Module btrfs is in use
This is very much expected, since sdb3 is btrfs and supposed to be mounted to root. From my mkinitcpio.conf file:
MODULES=""
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck"
Best Answer
I figured it out. My bootloader wasn't configured properly. Sounds obvious, right? Modifying fstab doesn't quite qualify as configuring the bootloader. I had to change a line in
/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cgf
to refer to correct boot partition.That said, there was no need to boot off of the second disk in the first place. I could have avoided this problem by completing the whole process in a live environment and chroot-ing in to run
mkinitcpio
.