to ext4 or not...

[darose-prQxUZoa2zOsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org (David Rosenstrauch)]

David Kramer wrote:
> I'm really stuck now, though, because there's no way to get my root
> partition back to ext3.  Since it's /, it's got /dev and /proc and other
> things you can't just tar up.  So I've symlinked some critical things
> like /var/mail to other filesystems.

Reboot your system onto a LiveCD (e.g., SystemRescueCD).  This removes 
/dev, /proc, etc. from relevance, and then you can tar up the root FS.

DR