Arch Linux

heimdal

Member

Registered: 2009-06-25

Posts: 27

/ and /home

Hello,

I was thinking to consolidate my sda3 and sda4 partitions (which are / and /home) into one partition. My question is that am I able to do this without much error, I know that I will need to back up sda4 (/home) and then delete the partiton and grow sda3 (/) at which then I assume to place everything into /home from before and then chown the directories with the correct users. As well as change my fstab to not mount /home anymore.

The major point of this, is will this screw anything up really? As in is there anything that might go boom because /home is now part of /?

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: / and /home

If you tar up /home (maintaining all permissions) then it should go relatively smoothly.

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,791

Re: / and /home

1. Unmount /home (sda4)
2. Verify the /home directory still exists of off / (on sda3) and is now empty
3. create a mount point ( maybe /mnt/disk )
4. using root permissions, mount /dev/sda4 on /mnt/disk (or whatever you called it)
5. copy files from /mnt/disk to /home

Thus far it is safe.  Now things get scary.

6. Remove the /dev/sda4 to /home mapping from /etc/fstab
7.  If you are really brave, you can delete sda4.  If sda3 and sda4 are contiguous on the disk, and you are really brave, and you trust your backups (you do have them, right?) -- you could resize your /dev/sda3 partition.

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fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,224

Website

Re: / and /home

Can I ask why you want to consolidate? Maintaining /home as a separate partition is generally considered a good practice.

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heimdal

Member

Registered: 2009-06-25

Posts: 27

Re: / and /home

Can I ask why you want to consolidate? Maintaining /home as a separate partition is generally considered a good practice.

I want to in order to give / more room, and it gives the abillity to have windows on it, which my work requires me to use since linux is a "hacking" OS

Heller_Barde

Member

Registered: 2008-04-01

Posts: 245

Re: / and /home

[off-topic] do you live in germany? they have this widely-spread, twisted notion of linux as a hacker-tool [/off-topic]

generally, there is actually not much you can screw up when migrating your /home... just keep your back ups up to date and follow the instructions posted above.
but to be honest, I would recommend you to reinstall your system from scratch (if you want to dual-boot, at least that's what I read from your posts) because yes, it's possible to install a windows in a partition that is not the first, and after linux, and yes, you can fix all the havoc to your boot sector that windows has wreaked, but my experience is that in the time I spend on researching my specific situation and the solution to it, I would have backed up, wiped, reinstalled windows and linux twice...

just my two cents
cheers
Barde

heimdal

Member

Registered: 2009-06-25

Posts: 27

Re: / and /home

[off-topic] do you live in germany? they have this widely-spread, twisted notion of linux as a hacker-tool [/off-topic]

generally, there is actually not much you can screw up when migrating your /home... just keep your back ups up to date and follow the instructions posted above.
but to be honest, I would recommend you to reinstall your system from scratch (if you want to dual-boot, at least that's what I read from your posts) because yes, it's possible to install a windows in a partition that is not the first, and after linux, and yes, you can fix all the havoc to your boot sector that windows has wreaked, but my experience is that in the time I spend on researching my specific situation and the solution to it, I would have backed up, wiped, reinstalled windows and linux twice...

just my two cents
cheers
Barde

Well I was just going to copy the old hard drive's windows partition that was in this computer, then 'link' it in GRUB.
[off-topic] The Chaos Computer Club loves linux, and are somewhat popular which is why it is viewed that way, also we have this idea that open source is dangerous since the code is on the net it must then have been exploited by the people, blah blah blah. [/off-topic]