Ok - I understand the need to convert the 250gb to EXT3 - I’ve gone looking and can’t find much that indicates I’ll be able to convert to that format on the fly - so once I get the server up to a point where I can access the drive, I’m going to have to convert half of it to EXT3, move everything over to it, convert the other half, and then merge. Quicker/easier than trying to move everything off the share, convert, and move back.
When you say "convert" filesystems, do you have a magic software utility that will do that for you? Otherwise you've got quite a task ahead. In-place "conversion" from NTFS to ext3 is not something I've seen done before. I have used Partition Magic to shrink an NTFS partition, open up the free space, put the disk on Linux, and format (mkfs) the ext3 partition. But last I knew, Partition Magic didn't deal with non-Microsoft filesystems.
But overall it's MUCH easier and less error-prone to get a separate disk, copy the files to it, repartition/reformat the original disk, and copy back.
Am I correct in assuming that your 250GB NTFS disk has something under 125GB of files on it, so that you can in fact shrink the NTFS partition to half of the physical size of the disk?
Get yyourself a BIG drive...Seagate’s 1.5 Terabyte was going for $129 a few weeks ago...