Moving /home

xodeus · 10-01-2003, 02:57 PM

Hi. I've just got me a new HDD. and I would like to move my /home to it? How do I do that proper without having to destroy my slack installation?

david_ross · 10-01-2003, 03:05 PM

Once you have created a partition and filesystem. Mount the new partition and copy all your data. Unmount the old partition or move the /home folder if it is on the root partition. Then mount the new partition as /home. Then all you need to do is update fstab to mount the new home on boot.

xodeus · 10-02-2003, 04:02 PM

Okay then!
I have to format the new HDD and move copy alle the files from /home to the new partition. The mount it like /dev/hdb1 /home ext3 blah blah blah. ??

david_ross · 10-02-2003, 04:05 PM

Yes but don't mount it as home to start with. Create a seperate point like "/home-new" then make it /home once it has all the data on it.

xodeus · 10-02-2003, 04:22 PM

Yeah. Or like /home-temp or something else, but not at home! I do really understand! :-) Thanks!

xodeus · 10-06-2003, 05:09 AM

whatabout copying all the files! I'm now ready to copy, but how?
I can maybe stay in the CL and write:
cp /home/ /home-temp
or what?
Please help!

LSD · 10-06-2003, 06:28 AM

Copying the files like that will change their owner and group to whatever user copied them (probably root). What you want to do is move them but I don't know if the standard move command will move directory trees. You could use midnight commander but failing that, I suggest you tar the entire directory, delete the old files, mount the new partition as /home, and untar the entire directory using the -p switch to preserve the permissions:

Code:

cd /home
tar jcvf /tmp/home.tar.bz2 .
rm -rf *
cd ..
mount /dev/hdb1 /home
cd home
tar jxvpf /tmp/home.tar.bz2

Pollyanna · 10-06-2003, 03:33 PM

Hi,

I would like suggest two other approaches.

Fist there is
cp -rp /home-old /home-new

-r duplicates directories recursively
-p preserves mode,ownership and timestamp
(see also: man cp) ;-)

The second consideration uses the tar command as LSD suggested, but in a slightly different way:

(cd /home-old ; tar cf - .)|(cd /home-new ; tar pxvf -)

The advantages are:
preserves *all* protection information (see also: man tar)
Symbolic links are transfered as symbolic links and not as files.
There is no real file created, so no additional diskspace is used while transfering the data.

Disadvatage: both directories must exist before the transfer.

Hope it helped

Pollyanna