Hello,
I recently bought a new SSD Hard drive.
Currently I have OpenSUSE installed on one HDD (one partition for /). I want to have the SSD for / now and the HDD for /home.
What is the best way to do this with minimum loss to settings/data, if it is even possible.
Thank you,
There are probably a couple of ways to do this but I have done it two ways.
Copy your entire /home directory to an external hard drive. Put your new drive in the PC and re-install openSUSE using the parameters you want (/ on SDD and /home on HDD). You will have to remove all partitions from the HDD and just make one large primary partition to hold your /home mount point (you need a swap partition too). During the install you should create a user that is exactly the same as your old user. Once the install is done you should let it update itself and and make sure you have rebooted, I give it a couple of hours to settle or run “zypper ref” then “zypper up” untill there are no more updates. Once this is all done you can copy back your backup over top of the current /home and reboot. You should probably boot from live media or something to copy the /home dir back, otherwise some files will be in use and cause problems. You should be back to normal.
Put your new drive in and re-install openSUSE using the SDD as the new / mount point. Use your old /home mount point on the new install but make SURE NOT to format it. When you make a user during the new install make sure not to make it the same one you already have. When the install is done and updated you can then use an openSUSE rescue DVD and gparted or other method to remove the / partition from your HDD and expand your /home dir to take up the whole drive.
What ever method you use make sure you have it figured out ahead of time and make a backup of your /home.
Thanks for the reply. I will try the first method. The SSD is only small (64 GB). would you recommend using the SSD for the swap?
You will probably get a few opinions about this, my feelings are it would be fine and even beneficial to do so. The reason I think it would be ok is that either your swap will hardly get used or you will change equipment long before the sdd wears out from swap use. The reason I think it might be beneficial is if you use it for hibernation or deep sleep, then your computer can wake up to previous state in seconds instead of 10s of seconds. If you like/need the latter, make sure your swap is slightly larger than your installed memory. I myself have not had much luck in hibernation with openSUSE but I think it is hardware dependent.
My RAM is 8GB. So Say I set it to 9GB, that leaves 53GB for /. How much space do you think will be sufficient for SUSE? I an not a pro but I think most data will be stored on /home (steam games, wine games, music, downloads etc). I do use the repo’s alot also (they do not generally use /home or am I wrong?).
That will be plenty, I had my / on a 35GB drive for a long time and it never really got full. I did move to a 100GB but only because I jumped out of windows totally and had the extra drive, I think that drive is 40% full or something. Sorry I am on another pc or I would check for sure.
On 05/14/2013 11:26 AM, anika200 wrote:
>
> Glen_Dunno;2556735 Wrote:
>> My RAM is 8GB. So Say I set it to 9GB, that leaves 53GB for /. How much
>> space do you think will be sufficient for SUSE? I an not a pro but I
>> think most data will be stored on /home (steam games, wine games, music,
>> downloads etc). I do use the repo’s alot also (they do not generally use
>> /home or am I wrong?).
>
> That will be plenty, I had my / on a 35GB drive for a long time and it
> never really got full. I did move to a 100GB but only because I jumped
> out of windows totally and had the extra drive, I think that drive is
> 40% full or something. Sorry I am on another pc or I would check for
> sure.
My system has a lot of the standard packages installed, and I am using about 13
GB in / without splitting any of the parts (/var, /usr, etc.) onto separate
partitions. Now, /home is a different matter as it occupies 85 GB, and its
partition is 80% full.
Thanks a lot for the advice guys!