Re: Safe Re-Partitioning?

[Tony Nugent <Tony Nugent usq edu au>]

On Wed Sep 30 1998 00:00, Raymond Popowich wrote:

> I have had my Red Hat 5.1 system running for a while now and I have a
> good idea about how much space I need allocated to my different file
> systems (/home, /tmp, /var, etc)  I currently have only a / and swap
> partitions.  Is there a safe way to repartition a system without
> loosing any data?  I would like to break my system up into /, swap,
> /tmp, and /home partitions.  I could not find any usefull information
> in the man's or the online support pages.  Any thoughts would be
> appreciated.

I've done this so many times now that I'm sick of doing it!  (By linux
support is my job, and I've been upgrading a lot of RH4.2 and RH5.0 boxes
to RH5.1, with quite a few new installs as well).

Ok, so you are going to trash your system.  Fine... easily recovered with a
re-install.

I also partition in / (~50Mb) swap (64-96Mb) /tmp (~100Mb) /var (~100Mb)
/usr (~450-650Mb) with the remainder of the disk devoted to /home (which is
usually well over 1Gb).  The numbers change depending on the situation.

I put / /usr and /home into their own primary partitions.  Then I put /tmp
/var and swap into an extended partition.  That nicely separates up the
"usually-read-only" partitions from those that are "usually-read-write".
That takes up all available partition slots (one extended, three primary)
so if there's also a dos partition, one of /, /usr or /home will need to go
into the extended partition.

(To do things like this, use fdisk during the install, not disk druid...
D-D puts EVERYTHING into one extended partition.  Whatever).

What you need to save before you trash are the major configuration files in
/etc and in your user home directory (or directories), oh, and in /root.
Either take a raw tar-ball archive of these directories, or go though and
save only what you have customised by hand.  Save all this off onto a
floppy disk.  The only other place to look is /usr/src/ if you've done any
compiling rpm building, etc.

(I reformat a floppy as ext2, mount it, create /root /home and /etc in it,
then save off the critical files and/or subdirectories).

Then reboot into the install program and re-install your system, doing the
repartitioning with fdisk by deleting all the current partitions, then
making sure later that all your new partitions get formatted.

Hehehe... by now I've done this so many times that I know what to save off
and what to customise after a (re)install.  In fact, I have a floppy disk
all set up like I've described and use this to copy files over onto the new
install.  (Eventually I'll be putting all my customisation files up on the
web).

Hope this helps to get you going.

Oh btw, once you have /home in its own partition, you have leave this alone
when you eventually rebuild your system with RedHat 6.9 (or whatever:) --
you can trash the rest of your partitions, and even save /root and /etc
into /home for easy access from your new system.

Good luck.

Cheers
Tony
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  Tony Nugent <Tony Nugent usq edu au>           <linux usq edu au>
  Computer Support Officer                       Faculty of Science
  University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Oueensland Australia
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