LinuxQuestions.org - A few Questions about Data Partitions

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A few Questions about Data Partitions

I have a 190gig data partition on my hard drive and I was wondering a few things.

First off when it mounted it auto mounted to the point /media/disk - from this point forward will it continue to mount to that same point or do I have to do something special for it to do this?

Second, can I install applications to a data partition instead of /home? My Cedega folder gets rather large when I have all my games in it and I would much prefer them to reside on the larger partition.

Lastly, I have a Desktop, Documents, Videos, Pictures, ect folders on my data partition. How would I go about creating a 'symlink' between these folders and the corresponding folder in my /home directory?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, any help/pointers would be great :)

~Jeff

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff91 (Post 3655462)

First off when it mounted it auto mounted to the point /media/disk - from this point forward will it continue to mount to that same point or do I have to do something special for it to do this?

Mounting using the mount command is temporary.... to make it automount on boot make an entry in /etc/fstab

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff91 (Post 3655462)

Second, can I install applications to a data partition instead of /home? My Cedega folder gets rather large when I have all my games in it and I would much prefer them to reside on the larger partition.

Yes you can.... just mount the data partition somewhere n then change the settings during install to point there.... instruction to change the installation path can be found in the application's readme (usually)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff91 (Post 3655462)

Lastly, I have a Desktop, Documents, Videos, Pictures, ect folders on my data partition. How would I go about creating a 'symlink' between these folders and the corresponding folder in my /home directory?

Code:

ln -s /path/to/docs /home/jeff/link

Hi Jeff,

Firstly, I'm guessing the data drive is portable due to the fact that it mounted under /media. I think the name 'disk' is given to unlabelled media so it could possibly be mounted under a different mount point if you had something else plugged in first. To avoid this possibility you could label it and it would then get mounted under /media/'label'. (man e2label)

As far as installing applications goes, it depends on how they're packaged, eg. an rpm will have its install paths already defined
If it comes as a tarball (tar.gz, .tgz) and has a make file it may support the '--prefix' option which will allow you to install it wherever you like.

Replacing dirs with symlinks
*Please note that you may get some 'unexpected' results if the drive is not available at login, going the symlink route is possible but personally I wouldn't do it

Copy existing data in the Desktop, Documents, Videos, Pictures directories under your /home... directory, ensure the permissions match then delete the ones under /home... and replace with symlinks to /media/'label'/Desktop etc.

This is not tested but should give you an idea of the process:

Code:

#!/bin/bash



NAME=$(id -un)



if [ -z $NAME ]

then

  echo "Could not obtain user name, exiting"

  exit

fi



for dir in Desktop, Documents, Videos, Pictures

do

  echo "Moving $dir"

  # Copy existing data

  rsync -avz /home/${NAME}/$dir /media/disk/$dir

  if [ $? -eq 0 ]

  then

    # Remove directory

    rm -rf /home/${NAME}/$dir

    # Replace with symlink

    ln -s /media/disk/$dir /home/${NAME}/$dir

  else

    echo "Move of $dir failed"

  fi

done

cheers,

kbp

Actually the 190gig drive is an internal drive - I am multi booting my laptop so I want to share it between the different distros (Same docs and files ect) So it will always be "attached"

I'll give setting up fstab a go and will post back if I have any issues with it.

~Jeff