Working with Debian Sarge. My /home dir is located on hdb, and I need to move it to hda, because hdb is showing clear signs of imminent self-destruction.

Here's the issue(s):

- Currently, hda5 (preferred target of /home) is ntfs, and even as root I have only read privs.

So I need to:

- Gain write privs to hda5, rewrite the partition, and move /home to that point.

The above is semi-educated guessing. Any correction, where necessary, in my diagnosis of both problem & solution would be much appreciated. Also, some guidance on how to proceed would be great.

Thanks in advance.
dn58

Just to make sure, you don't want your NTFS there anymore? I'll gather that's what you mean by rewrite partition.

You only have write for a very very good reason, that's all that the kernel drivers support safely (and writing over a file without changing it's size lately too)
Just start up your favourite mkfs.<blah> to make yourself a new parition. (like mkreiserfs, or mkfs.ext3, so on)

If it tells you to delete the partition you had before, use fdisk to do so (man fdisk), or get cfdisk, which has a nice graphical frontend for the commandline-flag-shy. I've never had an NTFS parititon to convert, so I don't know any specific issues, this should definitely work though.

The issue with write permissions is just to the partition data itself, you can do anyhting to a disk as root

You should reformat hda5 to a linux filesystem. Use cfdisk or fdisk to change partition types and then create a filesystem.

See below
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...-partplan.html

Thank you both. By some mixture of solid, clear advice & sheer luck, it seems to have worked. I can't adequately express in text how very surprised I am.

dn58