Well, after nervously googling my way for the past couple of days, 
I finally got up the nerve to convert my ext2 partitions to Reiser. And lo 
and behold, three hours later, everything works! Almost. When I go to 
reboot, it says "reiserfs: Unrecognized mount options" and upon rebooting 
it checks the transaction log. /etc/fstab is as follows:
/dev/hda6       /       reiserfs        defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda7       /usr/local      reiserfs        defaults 0 2
        Oh, yes, everything is tabbed spaced (I had to cut things short in 
this message, for obvious reasons.)
        Well, I think that's it for one day, though. If anyone would like 
to know how I did it, I would be happy to post my steps.
        :Peter