Hello -

I've been running RH9 for about three months now, and had no prior experience of Linux. When installing, I accepted the basic partitioning options the setup offered me, because I knew no better - so I've got:

/dev/hda1 which is 102 MB
/dev/hda2 which is 18599 MB
/dev/hda3 which is 377 MB

(These values from Hardware Browser)

I've recently heard that it's best to create /home as a separate partition. Is this so? And if so, can I make a new partition at this point, and how do I then move /home to the new location?

Thanks for any advice,

MS

If your hd is full (partitionwise & not datawise), shrink one of the partitions with partition resizing software. Then make a new one (hda4?). Put a filesystem on it:
mke2fs /dev/hda4
Mount it somewhere (say /newhome):
mount /dev/hda4 /newhome
Then copy everything as root:
cp -a /home/* /newhome
Then move the old one someplace else, and create an empty /home. Add a line to /etc/fstab (example):
/dev/hda4 /home ext2 defaults 0 0

maybe im wrong but i think you should run the "mount" command from a terminal. it will tell you where /home is mounted. maybe you'll see it's a separate partition already.

thanks to aaa and jib2. when I follow your advice jib2, I get:

/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
/dev/fd0 on /mnt/floppy type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=ian)

which I'm afraid means zip to me - can you tell me, is it in a separate partition? and if not, and I do need to follow aaa's advice, could either of you recommend some partition resizing software?

thanks.

obviously it isn't. but hda2 is pretty big (more than 18GB) so you should find some room.
anyway, you NEED to follow aaa's advice since he's a guru. :-)

There is no /home
hda1 is /boot
hda2 is /
hda3 appears to be for swap space

Shrink the hda2 using something like GNU Parted or Partition Magic. Then create a new partition using fdisk. Note the the new partition will be hda3, and swap will be pushed from hda3 to hda4. Edit your /etc/fstab accordingly.

One last thing, which was where I started: is this a good thing to do?

I don't think it's needed. Your current arrangement looks fine.
One use for a /home is for multiple distros, so you can have the same home directory in both.

That was my thought - because I've been told Mandrake is more stable than RH9. That said, RH9 has always been pretty stable. Except that it's become a bit wobbly since I installed KDE 3.2 last week - which is great in most regards, but does some strange things: menus seem to freeze and I can't click on them (but pressing 'Esc' will take me back), and sysguard keeps saying 'Lost connection to localsys!'. Hey, you thought you were responding to one question, and it turns out I'm one very confused newbie! Thanks for your help so far.