Moving /home to another HD: How to?

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi all…

I’m very new to SUSE but have been using other Linux distros for a few years now. I generally try things out first and then ask questions later, but this time I think I’ll ask first.

I have an old 30 GB IDE drive with my / /swap and /home directories on it. I have another 500 GB SATA drive partitioned 411GB and 38GB. I’d like to move my /home to the 38GB partition and then create some more partitions on the old 30 GB drive to try out some other distros as well.

My df -h output looks like this:

david@linux-3wa0:/> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 11G 9.3G 669M 94% /
udev 2.0G 128K 2.0G 1% /dev
/dev/sda3 16G 2.1G 13G 15% /home
/dev/sdb3 411G 167G 228G 43% /mnt/samsung
/dev/sdb1 38G 176M 36G 1% /home2
/dev/sdc5 230G 20G 198G 10% /mnt/documents
/dev/sdc6 230G 97G 122G 45% /mnt/music
/dev/sdc7 230G 43G 175G 20% /mnt/photos
/dev/sdc8 230G 165G 53G 76% /mnt/videos

I know sda2 looks full, but this should be fixed next time I boot.

My question is: what do I have to do to go about successfully migrating my /home files to /home2? I’ve copied them all over using Krusader and created a lost+found file. My ls -al output for /home and /home2 are identical.

If it were just me, right now, I’d delete /home/ and then repartition sda3; but I have a suspicion that I’m missing something. Am I? What’s the right way to go about trying this?

Any and all help appreciated. I’m very basic with bash but I can manage using the partitioner under YAST and editing my /etc/fstab.

#2

Nothing so drastic. Just edit the line with /home in /etc/fstab to change the partition to that of /home2 and it will be mounted there next time. And remove the current line specifying /home2 of course, or you will be trying to mount that partition at two places. You can then do what you want with the old home at your leisure.

#3

fstab is the key here
just edit accordingly
you might also want to include whatever you do with the old /home

notice how suse id’s drives in fstab now…
but you can still add a drive the old way
ie: sda?..

#4

1. There’s no need to create a lost+found directory, it’s created automatically on Ext3 filesystems.
2. I don’t think copying with Krusader (whatever that is) is a good idea. Probably it has reset all the file ownerships to the user you were logged in as when you did the copy. This will be a problem if there are multiple users having their home directory in /home.

If you are the only user it may be ok, but I would do the copy with something like tar (as root): tar cDf /home - .|tar xDf /home2 -

Pax or cpio also preserve file ownerships like tar. Or there are some options for cp to do this too (cp -p?)

#5

I have done this a number of times in the past. I alway do the following:

  1. Create directory /tmp/newhome
  2. Mount the new HD in that directory
  3. As root I do:
    3.1 I execute: cp -apR /home/. /tmp/newhome
  4. Go in single mode, just in case. (init 1)
  5. Unmount the old /home (umount /home)
  6. Edit the fstab in order to mount the new HD.
  7. Mount the new HD in /home
  8. Create a directory under /mnt as /mnt/oldhome (just in case of problems)
  9. Mount the old HD in /mtn/oldhome
  10. init 5;exit and the new HD is now my new /home.