Moving a mount point to a new hard drive

koremori@yahoo.com · 02-19-2007, 07:55 AM

I have added a 320 gb hard drive to my fedora 6 installation because my /home and /usr mount points were running out of space on my 80 gb hard drive. I want to move them to my new hard drive as well as creating a /u01 mount point (I intend to install Oracle 10g).

I don't want to reinstall Fedora 6 and go through Disk Druid because my network is all set up nicely.

If I create /home and /usr mount points on my new hdb drive will they be seen as extensions of the existing /hda directories ? Or do I have to back up the contents of the hda /home and /usr directories, delete the partitions from hda, and recreate the partitions on hdb ?

Also, this is my existing /etc/fcstab

$ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/opt /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/tmp /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/usr/local /usr/local ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=SWAP-hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

What change do I need to make to enable the system to see the new hdb drive ?

Thanks in advance

MensaWater · 02-19-2007, 08:46 AM

You'll need to backup and restore. Partitions on one drive are not seen as extensions of another drive.

You CAN use partitions from two drives for a single filesystem however by using Logical Volume Manager (LVM). However you'll still have to do the backup and restore approach for the filesystems.

You could also use mdadm to use two partitions for a RAID0 (concatenated device) - I wouldn't however. I'd use LVM instead - I'd use mdadm only if I wanted to do something like a mirror or RAID 5 to protect the data. Depending on how much space you have you may wish to do that if you're not using protected space (e.g. have a RAID controller or external RAID device).

v00d00101 · 02-19-2007, 01:15 PM

Alternatively, make a directory called /home on your new hard drive (you may have to use gparted or fdisk to make an ext3 partition first and mkfs.ext3 to format it).

Code:

su
mkdir /mnt/temp-mount
mount /dev/xxx1 /mnt/temp-mount
cd /mnt/temp-mount
mkdir /home
cp -R /home/youruser /mnt/temp-mount/home/
chown -R youruser.yourgroup /mnt/temp-mount/home/youruser

Edit fstab and change the /home line so the first part points to /dev/xx1 where xxx = the dev id for the new drive (hda etc) and the 1 represents the partition.

Code:

LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

to

/dev/xxx1 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

Then reboot and make sure it works.

Now you can delete the /home partition (or the data in home if it is part of /) on your 80gb and free up the space for /usr to use.

[edit]

So you need 2 partitions, one for /home and one for /u01.

Use gparted to make them. I'd recommend 280-300GB for /home, and whats left should be more than adequate for a lot of databases. They should become hdx1 and hdx2.
[/edit]