As my experience with Linux has increased and the more I love this system, I eventually realized that my dual-boot (Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04) needs some re-organizing on the Linux side.

My Linux system has slowed down considerably, but that is obviously due to the amount of work done [read experimentation ].

So, I'm planning a format of the linux partitions and re-installing Ubuntu or perhaps another distro like Gentoo.

But the problem is that I discovered that the linux partition has everything installed on a single partition, meaning that /home and /tmp and all the main directories are lumped together as opposed to having each one to a partition by itself.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to assist me in creating these new partitions and move the directories to their new home. As a bonus and on the way to stopping Dr. Evil from world domination, is to help me diagnose why my system has slowed down.

Hi there.

You should provide more information .


How big is the partition with windows and how much space left does it have .

How big is your home folder.

How big is your linux partition .

If your home folder is smaller than the free space left on the winodws partition i think you should copy it there, format , make the same user accounts and then put the home folders in the /home partition .

If you plan on installing gentoo you won't be able to keep the same /home partition with multiple distributions because ... i don't but i read it's not good [help me with that]

I am not very sure about the information i provided you so you should wait a bit more so that others tell you what to do .

But you still need to tell us what i requested.

Do you suspect that you're system is slowing down because you do not have enough disk space ?
Do you use more than 90 % of the linux partition ?
You do that you can delete the old kernels .

Bad advice . It is always nice to have the possibility to boot with an older kernel if necessary . they don't even take up that much space :\

Also , I never thought that having lots of files on a disk slow the system down. Reinstalling is the best . A thing that slow computers down , which is true , is that if you install the system at the end of the hardrive , i mean , in gparted you see it the last partition , or the before tha last one .

The last partition means that it's in the inner part of the hardrive . wich is slower , because the harddrive doesn't spin that fast in it's inner parts.

If you like to keep all the kernels that is up to you .
But why is it a bad advice after testing the new kernel to delete the old ones .
Do you ever let all the kernels on you're machine using UBUNTU .
How many kernels do you get than 5 kernels or even more

It actually occurred to me to post that information this morning. Sorry.

Windows: Total 154.7GB, 103.8GB free
Linux: Total 304GB, 133G free (according to df, 55% is free)

du -sh home (from the root) reports that home is 147 GB in size (total usage on the linux partition is 156 GB) but I can burn a few of the ISOs and free up maybe 90 GB.

But wouldn't it be possible to create new partitions and just move usr, tmp, root, boot, etc and them to their new partitions?

The gentoo thing is something I'm considering but obviously the integrity of my system is paramount.

Having said all of that, the two slow downs of the system are Thunderbird and boot. Which brings me to another question, would it be beneficial to compile my own kernel?