Help moving from SVN to GIT

I have recently moved an application from SVN to GIT. I have changed my
capistrano deployment script to reflect this change (ie: changed :scm in
my deployment recipe and pull from GitHub etc…), however I am unsure
of what, if anything, must be done on the production server.

My deployment now fails with the error, “fatal: Not a git repository”.
I am assuming this is because the code on the production server is not
yet a Git repo – but still an SVN working copy (still has .svn files in
the directory structure) checked out during previous deployments.

Can somebody point me in the right direction to help me understand what
must be done to the app directory on the production server to change it
from an SVN working copy to a Git repo. I am reluctant to do a cap
deploy:cold as I do not want to loose the db or uploads that have
occured since the app was first deployed.

Thanks in advance,