"The partitioning strategy that I chose came about
because I wanted to keep at least one ext2 formatted partition
around just in case I ran into problems booting from a ReiserFS
partition. As it turns out, I didn't have any problems yet doing
that so the ext2 partition may not be necessary in the future. In
fact, right now, it is empty. I don't have anything sitting on it.
But let's go back and talk about coming up with a good strategy
for converting drive A over to ReiserFS. Certainly, we can't just
run cfdisk and the mkreiserfs /dev/hda* where * is 2 and 4 before
we have a chance to copy/move all our important data over to
somewhere. That somewhere, in my case, had to be the drive C, the
30 GB hard drive. Another option would have been to copy all my
data to another computer over the LAN, if I had a computer that had
alot of local storeage. Or another option would have been to burn
my data to CD-R or CD-RW discs but again, with 8 GB to back up,
that seemed like alot of work. The simplest method would be to
simply copy the top level directories recursively over to drive C.A
further benefit of doing things this way is that if I copied into
the root directory on /dev/hdc1, then what would end up happening
is I would be creating a root fileystem on that partition that I
could later boot from using LILO.
But I didn't realize this at the time, I simply wanted to get my
data off drive A and onto drive C. Let's take a look at all the
directories in a typical root directory:"
