Re: [TCLUG:522] Newbie alert!

["JoshB [JellyD]" <joshb@techie.com>]

Sometime around the 3rd of July in 1998, the wannabe 3|173 h4ck3r Brian E. Seppanen sed:

> I feel like a moron, for doing this but I'm looking for
> suggestions.

We all have to start somewhere :)

> When I went through and installed RedHat5.1 about a month
> ago, I created 
> extended partitions as follows:
> 
> one 750MB partition mounted as /usr
> one 250MB partition mounted as /home 
> and one 250MB partition mounted as /
> 
> Dont' ask me why I did this, because its obviously one of
> the most inefficient things I could have done.  I've got
> disk space useage of 93% on /usr and 
> 37% on / and 0% on home.  The reason this is so silly is
> because I personally am using this as a desktop computer, I
> will never have 250MB of disk useage on home.  I probably
> will never use this pc as a multi-user server, don't ask me
> why I laid it out like it was going to be one.  If I were
> smart I would have done 1.25 GB on /.  Is there any way I
> can undo this mess without having to reinstall?  I've done
> several installs of various flavors so I suppose one more
> won't kill, but I'd rather not.  I was wondering if it would
> be possible to unmount /home on /dev/hda7 and remount it
> somewhere else perhaps /usr/share and try to optimize the
> storeage a little more.  Any suggestions would be
> appreciated.

I myself have the following setup:

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda3             248847   34854   201141     15%   /
/dev/hda2            2018474  875922  1142552     43%   /home
/dev/hda7             497667  329414   142551     70%   /usr
/dev/hda6             497667  107348   364617     23%   /usr/src
/dev/hda1            1050656  809984   240672     77%   /dosc
/dev/hda8            1738528 1184928   553600     68%   /dosd


A short while ago, /dev/hda6 was my /home partition, but it was full, and
I had /usr/src as a portion of the /usr partition (/usr/src wasn't a
dedicated partition, it just took up most of the space on the /usr
partition). Since I also needed more space on my /home partition (it was a
half-gig then) I found an extra 2gb partition on the drive that I had
forgotten to put anything on a few months ago, so I ran a mke2fs on it,
and then mounted it to /temp-mnt. I then made a big tarball out of my
existing /home partition, and extracted it to /temp-mnt. Then, I changed
my /etc/fstab showing that /dev/hda2 (the new 2gb one) was on /home. For
the next step, I mounted /dev/hda6 (the old half-gig /home) to /temp-mnt,
and did a rm -rf in the dir, to clean it off. I made a tarball out of the
/usr/src _directory_ and put it in /temp-mnt, then rm -rf in /usr/src,
then made an fstab entry for it on /usr/src.

When doing this, I found out that Linux (my Slack '96 at least) doesn't
like it if you try to umount one of the partitions that gets mounted on
bootup, e.g. the /home partition. That's why I made the /temp-mnt mount
point. I just renamed /home to /home-old and then renamed /temp-mnt to
/home to make sure it worked (just logged in and did a ls), then the
correct fstab and a reboot made it all fall into place.

In retrospect, I could do with a much smaller / partition (100mb -tops-
for me) but I don't really need that space (yet).

Now, I'm slightly curious why you don't have much in your home partition.
My home dir is 761mb, the majority of my /home partition. Of course, I've
got about ten thousand programs installed with custom source, but that's
just me =)

I suppose it all kind of depends on how much free contiguous disk space
you have for moving partitions-worth of data around ... I used my
then-mostly-empty /dosd partition for my huge tarballs. And yes, it did
take a while to move all that stuff around. 

--
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| Josh Becker                   - aka -                     JellyD |
| email: joshb@techie.com                       IRC: EFnet, DALnet |
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