Due to lack of knowledge/planning, my main hard drive ended up with six partitions. Not very useful or efficient.

This morning, after having created a Parted Magic boot CD, I set about fixing the problem. It took me most of the morning to:

• Use fsarchiver to create backups of / and /home.
• Use gparted to change the partitioning of the hard drive.
• Restore /home to the newly-expanded data partition.
• Change up /etc/fstab to point to the new data partition.

After I was done, I went to boot up Ubuntu. Umm...FAIL!!!

The poor operating system could not find the UUID that I had told it to look for to mount /home. It did at least get me to a command line. So, I fired up my favorite text editor, edited /etc/fstab and rebooted the system. SUCCESS!!!

Before I started, I had a 250 GB hard drive chopped up into six partitions (plus a swap space). The / folder was 30 GB in size, which was entirely too large.
Now in addition to the swap space, I've got a smaller (10 gig) / partition, a second 10 gig partition to add another distro and a very, very large data partition that both OSes can use. Ahh, efficiency!

I'm very pleased that I was able to get my Ubuntu desktop back up and running without having to bring my laptop in to research the problem. The fix that made it so that Ubuntu could find the /home folder location took five minutes to work around and then correct. All is well.

The best part, I believe, is not that my hard drive is laid out more efficiently; the best part is I now have a few new things in my toolbox to keep it running well.

I think I'm becoming less of an Ubuntu user and more of a Linux user...

Well congrats and keep it going . Mine's 250G too and I made 10 partitions to it. 2 are 20G for gentoo and slack, 2 or 4G swap, 40G for *NIX related files and the others.. well, you know .

I made the geometry of my HD sector (head?) oriented (cylinders * 63) so it doesn't seem to depend much on cylinders anymore. I configured it last 2006 with hdparm. That was rather dangerous... and exciting.