Moving to new hard drive question

[WhosRodney]

Hi all,

I'm going to need to need to move some of my partitions to new, larger disk and wanted to run it by you guys to see if you can point out any gotchas or flaws in my plan.

Here's what my current setup looks like:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 16G 1.8G 14G 12% /
tmpfs 942M 0 942M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 942M 284K 942M 1% /var/run
varlock 942M 0 942M 0% /var/lock
udev 942M 2.7M 939M 1% /dev
tmpfs 942M 0 942M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 942M 2.4M 940M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sda9 20G 15G 4.0G 79% /mnt/oldhome
/dev/sda8 20G 5.6G 13G 31% /srv
/dev/sda7 18G 12G 4.6G 73% /var
/dev/sdb1 925G 29G 887G 4% /home


As you can see, we're running out of space on /dev/sda (it's only 80G). /dev/sdb is a 1TB drive and currently only houses /home, so I'd like to move all of the partitions on /dev/sda (except for /dev/sda9) to /dev/sdb.

All non-swap filesystems are ext3. I'm thinking the easiest way to do this is:

make a disk image of /dev/sda
copy /home on /dev/sdb to another computer
reformat /dev/sdb
install the disk image of /dev/sda on /dev/sdb
remove /mnt/oldhome from /dev/sdb
add /home to /dev/sdb and then copy the backup of the old /home to the new /home partition on /dev/sdb


Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[khelben1979]

Your plan is probably good, however, I would never partition a harddisk like you have done.

This is how my harddisk (40GB) is partitoned over here:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 894M 139M 708M 17% /
tmpfs 156M 0 156M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 76K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 156M 0 156M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda8 14G 13G 155M 99% /home
/dev/hda7 90M 4.3M 81M 6% /tmp
/dev/hda4 4.6G 4.6G 0 100% /usr
/dev/hda9 15G 13G 1.1G 93% /usr/local
/dev/hda5 2.8G 426M 2.2G 16% /var

[redmk2]

I don't believe you need most of those partitions at all. When hard drives were smaller and less reliable the use of separate partitions was a good thing.

If you have only 1 drive at the end, what are you really gaining. This does not mean that you should not have multiple partitions on the drive. But rather; only the partitions that make sense. What you are trying to achieve?

I have the following on my machine (approx):
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 10G 5G 5G 50% /
...
/dev/sda3 20G 5G 15G 25% /home
/dev/hda4 90G 50G 40G 55% /smb


Here is why I configured the partitions. I have the /home so that if I reinstall I don't touch the data. I have the /smb for the same reason. Administrative controls (ACL's or disk quota's) can be used. These are partition wide. This allows me to control the data differently for /home vs. /smb. The /srv partition is where I have my Samba shares. I believe WhosRodney is using /srv for this purpose.

There is no functional reason to separate out /tmp, /var, /usr as these are all on the same spindle (hard drive) and therefore provide no advantage.

@WhosRodney,

Unfortunately, you have boxed your self into a corner with all these partitions. But, you only have to move the data to a larger disk. The /, /var, /usr don't really expand much overtime. I would start by creating only 2 partitions for holding only the data. These would be for mounting to /home and /srv. I would think about not using the whole disk (save some for later expansion).

Move the data out of those directories on the original disk. Use these as the mount points of the new partitions on the new disk.

Do you know how to mount partitions? I would temporarily mount one of the partitions to transfer the data.