> Hello all,
>
> I made up my mind, and decided to change a real partition to XFS. I made a
> backup, then formatted my 16Gb slice to XFS, which was ReiserFS previously.
> I mounted it without problems, but(!) I still could mount it as ReiserFS!
> Then I got back all of my files, like nothing happened with the partition.
> Mounted as XFS showed the partition empty. Weird, isn't it? I had to format
> the partition as ext2 (bad feeling seeing lost+found :-) ), then reformat as
> XFS. This was the way to properly eliminate ReiserFS.
> If some of you have a little time, please look into it.
xfs will not trash the disk when it "formats" it. this is most likely
what is happening. since xfs is lazy in its allocation and use of disk
space, it probably did not blow away the reiser data structures allowing
you to still mount it as reiser.
when you ext2 formatted it, it went through and allocated ext2 inodes and
such and copies of the superblock throughout the disk killing any chance
of reiser being able to mount it.
what I am surprised about is that xfs did not replace the magic number
that tells the kernel and other tools what type of fs it is. otherwise,
the reiser tools do not verify this number (or assume it could be
corrupted).
anyways, the best way to clean a partition is
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd[letter][number]
enough times that even the FBI cannot recover your data.
-tduffy
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