Re: Add a separate /home after installation?
On 10/02/14 12:45, Jon N wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I installed Debian I put everything in one partition. Now I'm
> wondering what I was thinking. / is ext4 for mated on a drive with
> eufi partition table, no raid or lvm. My thought is if I can shrink
> that and create a new partition I can copy over /home and then mount
> it as /home.
>
> I am pretty sure it can be shrunk, although I guess I'll have boot
> from another disk (it can't be shrunk while mounted I would guess).
> Does this sound like a reasonable way to do this?
>
> Thanks,
> Jon
>
>
Sure you can do that. e.g. boot from a Live CD like gparted and shrink
the slice, then create another slice in the remaining space.
Format it.
Mount the first slice (your root partition) with the Live CD and edit
/etc/fstab e.g.:-
blkid >> $LiveCDmountPoint/etc/fstab
then edit fstab using the UUIDs that the last command appended to it
(don't forget to remove output of blkid from the bottom of fstab).
Now mv the existing home to the new slice.
Reboot into Debian on disk. Done.
Everything and the kitchen sink into a single slice works, but it's not
optimal. It's easier to hunt for a fish in ponds than it is in an ocean
- index are similar, so fsck times and the ability to easily back up
/home are not the only reason to separate / and /home. It also reduces
the extent of damage from operator error when modifying bulk files. In
most cases allocating more than 20GiB to /root is just wasted space -
especially as /home tends to be the biggest space using meta-directory.
Kind regards
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