adding a new partition

Greetings:

I want to upgrade to 11.2 from 10.3. I was looking at disk usage
and noticed the last time I set up my system, I allocated too much space to the / partition. It’s only 50% used, while /home is 83% used. Rather than resizing and messing up /home, I thought about just adding a new partition created from the / partition. Call it say /data or something and put music, pics, pdf files and such there. But, would it be automatically mounted and what about permissions? Any ideas?

thanks,
reddogg

This explaining of:
. what you have
. what you want to have
is not complete and thus it is a bit difficult to guide you from the first to the second situation.

E.g. when you are going to use your present / (root) partition for data, where does your new root partition come from?

In any case, to get an idea about the disks/partitions you have, post the output of (as root)

fdisk -l

I hope you are basing your concerns strictly upon percentage usage. I have separate / and /home partitions. My / is 44% usage, but that is 11G used out of 25G. My /home is 42%, but that is 118G out of 296G. For me, freeing space on / for /home would be an insignificant improvement.

If indeed your /home is small and the free space on / would be a significant addition, you can do one of two things: a) resize / and create a new partition or b) create a directory, say /music, and bind mount it under, say /home/music.

I would not mount, but symlink it.

What is your reasoning?

More simple, always works, no permission issues. That’s my reasoning, maybe hcvv’s is different.

I agree with Knurpht. It is the solution that comes first to mind. It is something that you as a user can do on many places inside ‘your’ directories and files, why not here? And an

ln -s ... ....

is easy to understand.

When you want to mount a directory (not a partition) somewhere else, extra actions (by root) must be taken (the bind mount). It can all be done, but BotKeeper does not make it easy to the OP by not explaining how to do this realtive obscure way of mounting.

On 03/06/2010 11:36 AM, reddogg wrote:
>
> Greetings:
>
> I want to upgrade to 11.2 from 10.3. I was looking at disk usage
> and noticed the last time I set up my system, I allocated too much
> space to the / partition. It’s only 50% used, while /home is 83% used.
> Rather than resizing and messing up /home, I thought about just adding a
> new partition created from the / partition. Call it say /data or
> something and put music, pics, pdf files and such there. But, would it
> be automatically mounted and what about permissions? Any ideas?
>
> thanks,
> reddogg
>
>

Not a problem, you need to account for growth /var/ /tmp/ /usr/ /etc/
/lib/ on / (root) but usually 8-10 GB is more than enough for/ (root)
unless you’re running a Development Workstation, HTTP or Database
Server. /tmp is the dumpster for a distro when that fills up you can’t
get to the Desktop or sometimes boot.

Create your new partition (I use GpartedLiveCD) then name it /Data or
/music whatever. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

You don’t have to symlink it to /home or /home/$user but you can. My
/dev/sdb1 is allocated to /local not symlinked under /home and I’m smart
enough to use folders and files on that partition.

Thanks for the ideas. I would never have thought of using a dir and symlinking or mounting it. I may redo the partitioning anyway and take room from windows as it is only 32% used. Here’s df:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 9796820 4627984 4770748 50% /
udev 193032 88 192944 1% /dev
/dev/sda7 2774272 2207620 482072 83% /home
/dev/sda1 6578580 2073852 4504728 32% /windows/C

I wonder if resizing will mess up /home? Maybe I’ll be lucky but will backup anyway just to be safe. I wanted to avoid that by adding a new partition.
thanks again,
reddogg

I advise a clean install for rather than an upgrade (10.3-11.2) there are just too many differences in the OS and the apps. IMO just back up your home and do a complete makeover.

+1. It is good to contemplate on ones needs (in this case for partitioning) from time to time and this is an exelamt opportunety to reorganize.