Hello everyone, sorry if this thread is misplaced or already covered, but to me this is a bit of a puzzler.

I've got a desktop with data all over the place; it started out with windows, which I shared with fedora for a while before I corrupted and removed the windows partition due to shenanigans. I added in Linux Mint and enjoy it a good bit.

The OSes are on two different hard drives, with Fedora on a 1TB HD and Mint on a 500GB HD. I can access the data on the Fedora /home/ partition easily, but frankly, I'd like to be done with Fedora and transition over to Mint. Obviously the most reliable and clean way to do that would be to create backups, wipe the partition table, and do a clean install of mint on the 1TB drive, or even use it solely as the /home/ partition and use the 500GB for /.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to a backup drive or the funds to get one. Would there be any way of moving things around on the disks themselves (sort of a musical chairs thing with data) so I could wind up with Linux Mint as the only OS but preserve the data from both OSes /home/ partitions?

Here's how the disks are divvied up:

1TB disk: 141gb free, ext4 859gb: /, 52gb, swap, 10gb, /home/, 796gb

500GB disk: /, 62.9gb, /home/, 384.6gb, swap ~10gb

bonus points for anyone who can also provide the head of john the baptist.

A default installation of Fedora 18 running KDE takes about 5 GB, maybe 10 or 15 if you install everything, so unless you've got huge amounts of data or games in / you could shrink the partition should you want to keep it just in case. Depending on the amount of RAM and what processing you do having one or multiple 10 GB swap partitions may seem excessive too. Also you haven't given any reason why Mint shouldn't reside on the 500 GB disk or what's wrong with that installation in the first place?..

If you don't want to keep data then why not just delete the 141gb + 859gb + 52gb + 10gb partitions from the 1 TB disk? That would leave your Fedora /home 796gb which you could resize. Free space could then be used to hold a new partition in which you could store partition backup images. (Obviously you could create partition backups, delete partitions and resize the backup partition per partition, all it takes is more time). Then you disconnect the 1 TB disk (since it holds your backups) and use a Live CDROM, DVD or USB stick and resize your / 62.9gb and /home 384.6gb to what suits you or do a clean install of Mint?..

"Would there be any way of moving things around on the disks themselves (sort of a musical chairs thing with data) so I could wind up with Linux Mint as the only OS but preserve the data from both OSes /home/ partitions?"

You could start by copying the data from the /home partition in the OS you want to erase into the /home partition in the OS you want to keep.

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Steve Stites

sorry I took a bit to get back to you guys, thanks for replying; I think the part I left out of all this was I would prefer it if my /home/ from fedora could be expanded to fit the entire disk and be automatically mounted in mint. There's nothing wrong with the mint install, as unSpawn asked, in fact it works really well. I'm just a little fuzzy on how partitions from different operating systems can be made to mesh well with each other. As it stands, when I mount the fedora partition in mint, it has to be done at least once every time I boot, (which isn't that big a deal because I rarely have to reboot :-D) but it can make problems for things that require a static location, like a playlist or a script. When the partition mounts it always seems to use a generated name that might be hex or something.

Since all my partitions are ext3/4 they can definitely talk to each other, I just don't know how to sort out the permissions and the way they mount (I guess?)

See 'man mount' and /etc/fstab?

My goodness do I feel silly; I would have posted sooner but I was dealing with anaphylaxis from a nasty drug allergy for a while there. It seems that mint always mounts the partition in the same place anyway, and I don't know why it wouldn't have because the partitions were there when mint was installed. They went to high school together. So I can just go ahead and expand the partition, making a new table entirely and perhaps allowing mint to "own" the old partition, which was the bizarre focus of my problem.

marking as solved, thanks guys.