Arch Linux

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

I just bought a 500gb hard drive because I am running out of space on my current 80gb hard drive that's on this old dell computer. What's the best way to make my /(root) parition expand onto this new hard drive and basically have linux see both hard drives as *one* hard drive for the /dev/sda4 partition?

My parition scheme is simple..

/dev/sda1     Dell Utility
/dev/sda2     HPFS/NTFS (windows)
/dev/sda3     Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4     Linux

40gigs to windows, 40 gigs to Arch. Evrything is under /(root) directory in Arch.

-df -h:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4              39G   28G  9.6G  74% /
none                  251M  232K  251M   1% /dev
none                  251M  4.0K  251M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 251M   13M  239M   5% /tmp
/dev/sdb1             150G  113G   37G  76% /media/WD USB 2

Last edited by efourseven (2009-10-04 02:29:48)

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

You can move /home to the new drive.

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Re: Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

Yes, I guess that would be good enough... and easy enough.

tomd123

Developer

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 565

Re: Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

Yes, I guess that would be good enough... and easy enough.

if you want to get the most out of your space, you should probably set up an lvm (although that would probably require complete format) but the good thing about it is that it handles these situations well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Vo … er_(Linux)
Since devoting 80gb to / will probably be overkill (I have 15gb/20gb used and I have gnome, kde, oo.o, and lots of other packages installed).

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Re: Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

I wanted to stay away from a complete format. /(root) only has 40gigs, the other 40gigs have windows xp on it. I'm really only going to use the 500gig for files and stuff anyway so putting /home on that would be fine I guess. I was looking into setting up an LVM, but I guess it's not really needed for my situation.

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Re: Expanding /(root) directory to another HD

Ok guys... I got my 500gb sata drive installed.  Should I make it ext3 or ext4? I will be using virtualbox, does that effect the type of parition I should make it (ext3/ext4)?

My real question, how do I go about moving my /home directory to the 500gb dirve, which is located on /dev/sdb1. Right now it's located on /dev/sda4.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I'm guessing just...

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home
mv -rf /home /mnt/home

add this to my /etc/fstab: /dev/sdb1 /home ext4 defaults,noatime 1 2

if all works...
rm -rf /home

Last edited by efourseven (2009-10-10 01:47:37)