moving /home to new partition

[the bassinvader]

Hi everybody

I've been messing around with Debain for a while now, mainly using it as a backup/experiment system. When i installed, I put it all on one partition but now I'm trying to move my /home directory and all its files and settings onto a new partition. I've had some partial success using the usermod command and moving some files with the mv command but it's not really 100%. When i log into the my account, for example i dont see my desktop backgrounds or have my firefox settings or kppp settings ready.

Is there a way to essentially move my whole /home/user directory to a new partition without lots of messy commands in a long process? If so how?

[Roxoff]

What you do is log in using single-user mode (if you're on a lan this is quite important; if it's just you at home, you probably wont break anything if you dont bother - just make sure no users other than root are logged in while you do this), then mount your new /home on a temporary location such as /mnt.

Next do (as root):

cp -a /home /mnt

Edit your /etc/fstab to set your new /home using the new partition, reboot and test.

When you're satisfied that all is working, you can flip back to single user mode, unmount /home and delete the contents of the old /home (freeing the disk space) before remounting your new /home and flipping back to your normal multi-user runlevel.

[masinick]

Hi everybody

I've been messing around with Debain for a while now, mainly using it as a backup/experiment system. When i installed, I put it all on one partition but now I'm trying to move my /home directory and all its files and settings onto a new partition. I've had some partial success using the usermod command and moving some files with the mv command but it's not really 100%. When i log into the my account, for example i dont see my desktop backgrounds or have my firefox settings or kppp settings ready.

Is there a way to essentially move my whole /home/user directory to a new partition without lots of messy commands in a long process? If so how?

The tar command, originally used for "Tape ARchives", is really much more than that since it uses the classic UNIX I/O conventions.

With tar, you can create an archive and instead of storing it on a directory where you are located, you can use command grouping and pipe the output of one tar command to the input of another tar command in a different directory.

Here is a direct quote from tar on how to copy directories. I have used this very technique on both UNIX and Linux systems, using both the original UNIX form of the tar command and the GNU equivalent, and the behavior is similar:

Duplicate Directory

It is possible to duplicate an entire directory tree onto a disk using the tar command. The shell pipe mechanism is used with standard input and standard output. To copy the current directory to a directory named todir you should use the following set of commands:

cd fromdir
tar cf - . | (cd todir; tar xfp -)

Note that this command should be punctuated exactly as it is here. Also, the directory todir must exist before you perform this command.

[masinick]

Note the file and directory names can be anything, for example, suppose you want to move /home to a different partition.


Here is an example:

login to a terminal console, such as an xterm, eterm, konsole, gnome-terminal, etc.

Become the root user, either using the command

su

or using

sudo

, depending on the distribution you are using.

If you use su, type in

su

and then press Enter. You are prompted for the root password. Type in the password and then press Enter. If you provided the correct information, you should get a somewhat different prompt. Most systems use

#

as a prompt for the root (privileged user) account.

From root, you can run the following commands direcftly. Otherwise, prepend each command with the

sudo

command (Ubuntu, for example, requires this syntax, no direct login to root allowed).

e.g.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/newhome

cd /home
sudo tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/newhome; tar xfp -)

If you want to see what's going on you can do it this way:

cd /home
sudo tar cvf - . | (cd /mnt/newhome; tar xvpf -)

Note that the order of the tar arguments is not critical.

I can do similar things if the file is REALLY large by using the GNU tar feature that incorporates gzip functionality:

cd /home
sudo tar cvzf - . | (cd /mnt/newhome; tar xvzpf -)

[the bassinvader]

ahhh.....single-user mode and tar. New animals for me to learn about

THanks guys. I'll try both ideas and let you know how I get on.

Many thanks