I have a large unused hda7 partition, unmounted. Currently everything (/) is
on hda5. I would like to move /home and /usr/local to the unmounted hda7
partition. How can I do that easily and safely?

Larry Gagnon
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Larry Gagnon <lagagnon@fakeuniserve.com> wrote:
> I have a large unused hda7 partition, unmounted. Currently everything (/) is
> on hda5. I would like to move /home and /usr/local to the unmounted hda7
> partition.

Create two partition instead of one, copy the data from /home and /usr/local
in the two new partition, restart the system in single-user mode, rename
the old /home and /usr/local, mount the new one, change fstab, check
that everything is working, when you're sure, delete the old
/home and /usr/local directories.

Davide

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Davide Bianchi <davideyeahsure@onlyforfun.net> wrote:
> Larry Gagnon <lagagnon@fakeuniserve.com> wrote:
> > I have a large unused hda7 partition, unmounted. Currently everything (/) is
> > on hda5. I would like to move /home and /usr/local to the unmounted hda7
> > partition.

> Create two partition instead of one, copy the data from /home and /usr/local
> in the two new partition, restart the system in single-user mode, rename
> the old /home and /usr/local, mount the new one, change fstab, check
> that everything is working, when you're sure, delete the old
> /home and /usr/local directories.

Should work, however I see now reason why you should reboot, or
even change the runlevel, if there are some users at all, I'd log
them out, touch /etc/nologin. Mount the new partition to /mnt, 'cp
-a' everything over, umount /mnt, mv /home to /home.old, recreate
/home, mount the new partition, edit fstab accordingly and
proceed with the next partition.

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Michael Heiming <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de> wrote:
> Should work, however I see now reason why you should reboot, or
> even change the runlevel,

I'm not really sure if something is using /usr/local or not,
and hunting every single process is quite time-consuming, dropping
in single user or rebooting into it it's the fastest way.

Davide

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| Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion
|
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|

Larry Gagnon <lagagnon@fakeuniserve.com> writes:

]I have a large unused hda7 partition, unmounted. Currently everything (/) is
]on hda5. I would like to move /home and /usr/local to the unmounted hda7
]partition. How can I do that easily and safely?

(assuming an ext3 partition has already been defined on that drive)
mkdir /extra
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda7 /extra

mkdir /extra/home
mkdir /extra/local
cd /usr/local
tar -cf - . |(cd /extra/local&&tar -xpf - )
mv /usr/local /usr/local1
ln -sf /extra/local /usr/local
cd /home
tar -cf - . |(cd /extra/home&&tar -xpf - )
mv /home /home1
ln -sf /extra/home /home
echo /dev/hda7 /extra ext3 defaults 1 4 >>/etc/fstab

Once you are sure that everything got transfered fine, remove
/usr/local1 and /home1

Davide Bianchi <davideyeahsure@onlyforfun.net> wrote:
> Michael Heiming <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de> wrote:
> > Should work, however I see now reason why you should reboot, or
> > even change the runlevel,

> I'm not really sure if something is using /usr/local or not,
> and hunting every single process is quite time-consuming, dropping
> in single user or rebooting into it it's the fastest way.

# time ps aux | awk 'NR!=1{system("lsof -p "$2"| grep \"/usr/local\"")}'
[some lines about mozilla]

real 0m5.130s
user 0m1.830s
sys 0m3.220s



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"Michael Heiming" <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de> wrote in message
news:ct5isb.hua.ln@news.heiming.de...
> Davide Bianchi <davideyeahsure@onlyforfun.net> wrote:
> > Michael Heiming <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de> wrote:
> > > Should work, however I see now reason why you should reboot, or
> > > even change the runlevel,
>
> > I'm not really sure if something is using /usr/local or not,
> > and hunting every single process is quite time-consuming, dropping
> > in single user or rebooting into it it's the fastest way.
>
> # time ps aux | awk 'NR!=1{system("lsof -p "$2"| grep \"/usr/local\"")}'
> [some lines about mozilla]
>
> real 0m5.130s
> user 0m1.830s
> sys 0m3.220s

Well, yes. That's useful. However, if something is cron-job started or run
by a user while this transfer is going on, it's a bit more dangerousl.

Now me? I'd look at my partition table and consider simply expanding / to
include all the previously unallocated space and leave /home and /usr/local
the heck alone. I'm not a big believer in over-partitioning with modern
large and reliable disks and backup tools that no longer require you to
"dump" raw partitions, or restore them that way.

Otherwise, to put /usr/local and /home on the new disk space, you really
need to use two partitions, or maybe create a /home partition and make
/usr/local a link to a directory there, such as /home/local. Been there,
done that with weird disk allocations.

Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:

> "Michael Heiming" <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de> wrote in message
> news:ct5isb.hua.ln@news.heiming.de...
[..]
> > # time ps aux | awk 'NR!=1{system("lsof -p "$2"| grep \"/usr/local\"")}'
[..]
> Well, yes. That's useful. However, if something is cron-job started or run
> by a user while this transfer is going on, it's a bit more dangerousl.

As written in this thread I'd log of users if any and
touch /etc/nologin, stopping crond might be another good idea,
usually I don't expect anything to write to /usr/local unless the
box has a special setup.

> Now me? I'd look at my partition table and consider simply expanding / to
> include all the previously unallocated space and leave /home and /usr/local
> the heck alone. I'm not a big believer in over-partitioning with modern
> large and reliable disks and backup tools that no longer require you to
> "dump" raw partitions, or restore them that way.

Now I disagree, for some desktop this might be fine, albeit I'd
put at least /home on a on partition. A server is much better
& easier maintainable using separate partitions.

--
Michael Heiming

Remove +SIGNS and www. if you expect an answer, sorry for
inconvenience, but I get tons of SPAM

Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:
> Now me? I'd look at my partition table and consider simply expanding / to
> include all the previously unallocated space and leave /home and /usr/local
> the heck alone.

That's another solution, but the simple terms "expanding /" make me
shiver... I'm not a big believer in those "partition mangling" tools...

Davide

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"Davide Bianchi" <davideyeahsure@onlyforfun.net> wrote in message
news:bsjdv3$d4lvb$1@ID-18487.news.uni-berlin.de...
> Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:
> > Now me? I'd look at my partition table and consider simply expanding /
to
> > include all the previously unallocated space and leave /home and
/usr/local
> > the heck alone.
>
> That's another solution, but the simple terms "expanding /" make me
> shiver... I'm not a big believer in those "partition mangling" tools...
>
> Davide

They work pretty well. But I'm a sneaky weasel: I've done dirty tricks like
turn off swap, move that where I want it to be, made it a filesystem, poured
a compressed image of the OS into a tarball on that partition, repartitioned
the rest, and poured the tarball back onto the new partitions, then
re-formatted and enabled swap.

But I'm a complete weasel and comfortable with that sort of filesystem
mangling.