I’ve been able to acquaint myself with openSUSE more quickly than anticipated and with the exception of mostly DVD ripping/transcoding software, and a handfull of minor programs, I’m 100% Linux now (So really about 95% in total). My current issue is how I can restructure my setup to devote more resources to Linux, preferably without borking my setup or having to fully reinstall.
I’m good resizing the Windows stuff because I have backup images and software for that but what if anything will I have to change to keep SUSE working without reinstalling? Can I just partition the new HDD locations out the way I want and use my backup software to move images of the current setup? I assume I’ll have to rebuild GRUB to point to the new Linux install drive but what else? Would it be easier to just to reinstall to the new location? I’m just wondering what my options are at this point. Below I’ve provided my current HDD setup and then how I’d like to make it look.
Thanks.
Current:
sda - 250Gb
sda1 - 40Gb Windows XP
sda2 - 110Gb Documents and files like email shared between Linux and XP
sda5,6&7 - 90Gb openSUSE (/, swap, /home)
sdb - 500Gb movies, images and other large files
sdc - 250Gb Install location for Windows related programs
Planned:
sda - 250Gb
sda1 - 30Gb Windows XP
sda2 - 20Gb Install location for Windows related programs
sda3 - Documents and files, like email, shared between Linux and XP
If your BIOS is one of those that can only read the first two HDs, then you may want to swap sdb and sdc so that Linux is on a drive that BIOS can read.
You can, with care, move Linux to a different drive, but you will have to understand how to edit /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst and how to run GRUB to install the boot on the new drive. If you don’t have much data to restore, a reinstallation might be simpler.
Thanks Ken that’s kind of what I expected the answer to be which is why, me being me, I decided to move everything and call it a learning experience. lol!
So I’ve shrunk XP down to 20Gb, moved the Programs partition to the same hdd as the OS and dropped it down to 10Gb. Don’t figure I’ll be doing much in windows anymore so why let it take up lots of space. right? Between that and using the boot-loader to rearrange the order in grub (shoulda know it wouldn’t work) I’ve borked things twice now, got it back twice thanks to the grub loader on the LiveCD, and am getting ready to forge ahead with moving my openSUSE setup as soon as I finish defragging my remaining NTFS partions.
So right now my plan is to make images of the /, swap and /home partitions currently in use and then transplant them to the recently freed-up 250Gb hdd (sdc). Once that’s done I’ll use the grub loader from the LiveCD again to rebuild Grub. I do plan on keeping the shared files drive but it’ll be closer to 200Gb in size. For the Linux only drive I’m planning on 60Gb for /, keeping the 1Gb Swap and allocating the rest for /home (about 190Gb). Since I will have use of the full 250Gb HDD for Linux and will still have the roughly 200Gb shared partition would it be better to up the size of /?
Normally about 20-25GB for / is plenty even if you install lots of packages, unless you plan on having lots of data in /srv/www, or /var/lib/mysql, and even then you can change the root directory or make symlinks to somewhere in /home for those services. So your original allocation of 60GB was already very generous.