[thechat] Linux partition help

[Garrett Coakley]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 04:06:01PM +1000, Paul Cowan wrote:

> /home is a separate partition, so ideally I'd like to just move the data 
> onto the new disk and then change /home from being /dev/hda3 to being 
> /dev/hdb1 (or whatever).

The quick overview (these steps can result in data loss, so make 
sure you have backups!)

0: You've got your backups right? Tested them? Good....

1: Power down and attach the new hard drive

2: Powerup and then format (/sbin/fdisk /dev/hd{whatever}) and create a 
file system on the drive. 'mke2fs' is the main command, but depending on 
the file system you want there may be a wrapper script for it. EG for an 
ext3 filesystem the command on debian is mkfs.ext3

3: Mount the new drive somewhere temporary (mkdir /tmpdrv && mount 
/dev/hd{whatever} /tmpdrv)

4: Copy across existing /home to the new drive. You'll want to use 'cp -p' 
to preserve ownership and perms.

5: Edit /etc/fstab with an entry for your new drive. Mine looks like this:

[root at cincinnati root] # grep home /etc/fstab
/dev/hda3       /home           ext3    defaults    0   2

6: Reboot, and you should be good to go.


> Then, if I can merge /dev/hda3 with /dev/hda2 (/usr), that would be 
> wonderful.

Merging I don't think will be possible (not without setting up Logical 
Volume Management, not sure if RH8 has it running or not), but you could 
mount the old drive as /usr/local for example, depending on how much 
space you have on it.

Some more URLs that might help:

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;171470406;fp;2;fpid;1039317049
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html

G.

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