Hello,
I’m a plain user of Open SUSE 10.2 for more than six months now on a dual boot machine (Vista Ultimate) and I’m 80% mostly on Linux now but because of my job I still have to keep windows.
My 1TB HDD is full and I’ve got a new 1TB HDD to add to my system. My plan is to leave this HDD only for Vista and to use the new HDD for Open Suse, changing it to the 10.3 version and without to lose my data and my settings (keeping the Home directory).
Considering that I am a ignorant could someone give me a step by step plan as much as detailed possible, in order to succeed?
Nether 10.2 or 10.3 are any longer supported. The current version is 11.3 soon (in March) to become 11.4.
First off any partitioning is tricky and if there is any failure or mistakes you can lose all your data so you first need to backup your data. Yes that means you need at least another 1TB drive or other media. If the data is important to you then it is worth it. Extertnal 1-2 TB drives are now in the 100-150 US Dollar range.
Basic procedure would be
Backup
Make the New drive the first in the boot sequence.
Install the New Linux on the New Drive
Mount your old home Partition from the old drive and copy to you new home partition on the New drive (note be certain of the ownership of the copied files. They should all be owned by the correct user for each user directory.
Once 4 is done and all is happy you can remove the old partitions from the old drive and repartition it be how you want it.
Note you may need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to get Windows to boot.
Of course there are lots of ways to do what you outlined.
> My 1TB HDD is full and I’ve got a new 1TB HDD to add to my system. My
> plan is to leave this HDD only for Vista and to use the new HDD for Open
> Suse, changing it to the 10.3 version and without to lose my data and my
> settings (keeping the Home directory).
New disk entirely for linux? Nothing yet on that disk?
And you are not going to upgrade.
Then it is very simple.
Put the disk, boot the install DVD, make sure the proposal is to use the
entire new disk, change as appropriate.
After it runs correctly (with both linux and windows booting from grub in
the second disk), copy over all you want from the old home in the old disk
to the new home in the new disk.
When done, reclaim the old disk for windows.
As to details… I’m not very good at that. Easier to do than explain
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
There may be some performance gain by splitting vista and linux across the 2 drives. This however depends upon your workload and how things are partitioned. I assume that you have good backups of yout 1TB of data and systems
Provided that your existing system is more or less a default install then a reinstall and a subsequent move of /home should be the easiest way of moving everything to the new drive. You will need to make sure that any users and groups created by the new install match those of the old system. If you have added lots of software and done lots configuration it may be easier clone,restore from a backup or copy everything and then using something like the opensuse live CD configure grub and fstab. Somewhere in this forum there is a relatively recent thread on cloning hard disks
It is not difficult but equally it is not obvious and it is not easy to find clear step by step instructions on how to do some of these things.
Make sure you know what you have installed and all additional customisations that you have made.
Make sure you know what the existing partitioning is
Decide on the new partitioning and how you are going to get there
Read the threads in this forum on cloning and reinstalling grub
On 2010-12-30 17:06, vindevienne wrote:
> It is not difficult but equally it is not obvious and it is not easy to
> find clear step by step instructions on how to do some of these things.
The problem with step by step instructions is that if something goes a bit
wrong, or the instructions are confusing at one step, you are stuck. You
also have to understand what you are doing.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
Thank you guys! This is what I try… to understand what I am doing… I’d try to follow your advice and I’ll proceed after doing a backup. If I’ll get in trouble I’ll post here for help again!
As for now it seems that’s more simple for me to have first installed Linux on the new HDD, then to move the old home in the new one (this is the only “sensitive” issue for me since I never did it before) and then to use the first HDD only for Windows.
Wishing you A Happy New Year!
MC
P.S. One more "“nOOb” question… Could two different Linux distros share the same HOME? I do not necessary understand to use the same software installations and settings, but to save documents in the same folder… i.e. to have something like MyDocuments used as DEFAULT by Open SUSE and Ubuntu for instance…
No this won’t work as the settings among various distros are different and most likely You would have broken settings each time switching to a different distro.
> As for now it seems that’s more simple for me to have first installed
> Linux on the new HDD, then to move the old home in the new one (this is
> the only “sensitive” issue for me since I never did it before) and then
> to use the first HDD only for Windows.
Nothing to it, really. Copy the files from one to the other, don’t move.
Only after you verify the new copy is correct, you can delete the original
storage.
Use whatever you like to do the copy. CLI: rsync, cp -a, mc. Or gui browser.
> P.S. One more "“nOOb” question… Could two different Linux distros
> share the same HOME? I do not necessary understand to use the same
> software installations and settings, but to save documents in the same
> folder… i.e. to have something like MyDocuments used as DEFAULT by
> Open SUSE and Ubuntu for instance…
Use different homes, but link data folders of one to the other.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I’m not sure how far you’ve gotten but Goglathorp made a point I’d like to emphasize.
Just my opinions. Happy New Years and good luck!
Once 4 is done and all is happy you can remove the old partitions from the old drive and repartition it be how you want it.
Note you may need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to get Windows to boot.
Of course there are lots of ways to do what you outlined.
I believe you should initially boot into your old system and you can change the /boot/grub/menu.lst on the new HDD to point to the new HDD containing OpenSuse 11.3. So, menu.lst should show something like /dev/sdb1 as your boot device instead of /dev/sda1 for Linux.
Re: Noob question if you think you want to add another Distro then it best to leave some free space for the second OS on the new 1TB HDD now. I’m not as confident as Carlos E. R. about the symlinks between 2 versions of OS. It might be better to create a user group for the new OS that matches the user ids and group ids for OpenSuSe 11.3.
On 2010-12-31 23:06, tararpharazon wrote:
> I’m not as confident as Carlos E. R. about the symlinks between 2
> versions of OS. It might be better to create a user group for the new
> OS that matches the user ids and group ids for OpenSuSe 11.3.
Of course, the UIDs have to match. What I mean doing is this:
And many combinations. You can, for example, have an extra partition for
shared documents between distros, and symlink to it, or bind mount. In all
cases, the UID have to be the same across both distros.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
The Knoppix file now has a different uid:gid than Opensuse? I don’t know. Agreed the uid:gid have to be the same across both distros but is that automatic with symlinks?
On 2011-01-01 01:36, tararpharazon wrote:
>> I think I understand that but I’m not sure what permissions would be
> used when a file or folder is accessed by the different distros under
> symlinks.
The permissions are those of the original file. The permissions of the
symlink are irrelevant.
> The Knoppix file now has a different uid:gid than Opensuse? I don’t
> know. Agreed the uid:gid have to be the same across both distros but
> is that automatic with symlinks?
No.
You have to create both distros with users having the same UIDs on both -
manually. If the distros are already installed, you have check, and if
different, you have to change the UID of one of the users manually
(/etc/passwd) and then of all his files.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
Yes that’s why just symlinks didn’t sound quite right it didn’t solve the ownership problem. User would have to create a group or use the same group that works for both distros.
could someone give me a step by step plan as much as detailed possible, in order to succeed?