Re: Separate /home drive?
On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 05:24:25AM +0800, David Palmer. wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I've been reading different partitioning howtos but can't find any
> reference to a situation I thought I would like to install.
> It's probably a newbie idea, but I wondered if it would be possible to
> have system partitions on one drive, and posting to /home on another.
> If it is possible, does anybody have a reference they could point me to?
> Thanks for any information.
> Regards,
>
> David.
>
It is certainly possible, and in some situations, a good idea. In fact,
the Woody install process allows you to set up /home on a separate partition
during install. So it not just my opinion, but also has some authority backing
it. To actually *do* it, you need to give some thought to the order in which
the several steps are done, so that you don't loose your home directory and
its contents. Here is my first cut, from memory.
1. Prepare the separate partition, suppose it is /dev/hdc2
2. Create a mount point at /mnt/home2
3. Mount /dev/hdc2 at /mnt/home2
4. Copy /home to /mnt/home2
5. Check that /mnt/home2 is a true copy of /home
6. Change some non-essential file on /mnt/home so that you can tell it apart
from the original /home .
7. Edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/hdc2 at /home (This will hide and make
unavailable the original home directory, and place the new home partition
in use.)
8. Umount /mnt/home2 and mount /home . Check that /home now has the change
that you made to /mnt/home in step 6 above. This proves that you actually
have your new partition mounted at /home .
9. Later, after you have seen your new home partition working as you
wish, you can temporarily umount /home, and delete the old contents of
/home . Deleting the old version will release disk space on your root
drive. Don't be in a rush to do this. There may be something that
makes you wish to go back. Be sure to leave /home as an empty directory.
You need this as a mount point for your partition.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@peakpeak.com
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