new hard drive

emaherx

I have a 40 GB hard disk in my laptop
There is 20 GB of space for Windows and 20 GB for Fedora 6.

My problem is I am running out of hard disk space, so I bought a 120 GB drive.
It took me a great deal of time to set up my current copy of Linux the way that I have it and to get all of the hardware working (especially the Vodafone connect card, wireless networking and all of the plugins for Firefox) so I don't want to reinstall it.

I have no intention of installing windows on the new hard drive. So after all that waffle my question is, is it possible to use drive image software to copy and resize my Linux partitions on the new hard drive or would I be better off leaving the partitions the current size and creating a new partition to fill the rest of the drive.

bman

Is 20GB enough for your / partition in FC6? If so then I would backup my /home folder (I assume you don't have a seperate partition for / and /home at present?) and then partition the 120GB hard drive so you have a 20-40GB /home partition and the rest for a FAT32 partition which is readable and writeable by both windows and linux. Then simply modify your /etc/fstab file to mount your /home partition from your 120GB drive.

You will then have a 20GB / partition, 40GB /home partition, 80GB FAT32 and the 20GB windows partition.

emaherx

bman wrote:

Is 20GB enough for your / partition in FC6?

No 20 GB is not enough hence the new drive.

Also I am going to ditch windows altogether (from this laptop anyway).
So I will have the full 120GB Hard disk for Linux.

I do intened on creating a new partition for /home, what I really want to know is it possible to
safely resize my / partition?

PhantomBeaker

emaherx wrote:

what I really want to know is it possible to safely resize my / partition?

Re: Resizing. It depends on the type of the filesystem. So you need to do a bit of legwork on it.

The safest way I can think of this - without reinstalling, is to possibly make 4 partitions (or at least 3): /boot (it saves SO much pain), /, swap and /home (optional but recommended)

What you'd do then is copy the relavent stuff across from disk to disk. The only thing that would probably need changing is the fstab file.

Then install grub - and edit your grub configuration files to point to the right disks.

By the way, the reason I mention /boot is because I did a very bad thing with my first linux install. I just made 2 partitions, swap and /, and it dual-booted with windows with grub. So, the stage 1 of it was pointing to my / dir. This meant that I'd have "fun" if /boot on that partition went walkabout. As a result, I didn't upgrade my system for ages.

So, the two disk-dependant things I can think of would be fstab and grub. The rest generally don't care what disk they live on - unless the program is doing something silly.

Oh, and have a livecd to hand, they're really handy in cases like this.

Hope at least some of that is useful.
Aoife

Khannie

I had a similar problem a while back. I found a nice solution that might suit you but I can't remember what it was. Have a search back on this forum though.