Greetings, I am looking for opinions on a few different topics.

First is my filesystem. I have been using ext2 for all of my paritions. This includes the root, usr, and home partitions. Recently I have reached capacity on these paritions and I just purchased an additional 250GB hardrive. The disk with Slackware on it is /dev/hda, and there are two 30GB fat32 partitions that I use to store data that I need for both windows and linux. To increase the size of my linux partitions should I relocate the fat32 partions to the 250GB (/dev/hdb) hardrive first? This way I could use the additional 60GB of space on the same disk for Slackware. I was wondering if I should change my filesystem to ext3 or maybe a different journaled filesystem. This is desktop computer that isn't running many server appications. Any links to clarify this process would be much appreciated!

Also I need to recompile my kernel for many reasons. Mostly to support my Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and highmem support (it only recognizes 1/2 of my memory). Should I do all the partition stuff before recompiling? I thought about just reinstalling Slackware from scratch but I have spent lots of time installing various applications and getting random things to work. If I recompile my kernel to such drastic changes can I expect much of the software to function incorrectly? Thanks so much for reading this and any advice given ahead of time!

personally i would create new paritions on your new 250gb disk for slackware. then migrate your linux data to the new paritions. (using cp -R).

so now you've got two copies of slackware. okay, i would swap the disks round. so the new one is /dev/hda. then i would use a live cd to edit intall a boot loader on the new disk. once you're happy it works you could format the old disk juts as FAT32 and have it as hdb. or have windows residing on it, whatever...

i would use ext3 or reiserfs.


compiling a new kernel shouldn't make a difference. jsut do it at your leisure.

Yea I didn't think about that. cp -R retains all of the user information so it should be ok. Sounds like a good idea, I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

yeah, it's also safer, coz u aren't deleting anything...

Hi,

First, backup everything!

I would suggest that you run a parallel system for a short period. Meaning, setup the new hard drive with the old setup. Run off this for a short period to insure that a move will be ok. Test period should be long enough, so as to check the system out. You could use some benchmarking to test it. If the drive should fail then your up a creek without a backup or some place to fall back to.

HTH!

yeah, you can do that.

new stuff tends to fail a lot. if it's going to fail.

it's the old bathtub curve....

I think it's safe to convert ext2 to ext3 without data loss too as long as kernel has ext3 support built-in/or as module. Good thing you have separate /home partitition because you wont lose what's on it when you move it to new disk or make future upgrades. /etc/fstab would need change for new /home and maybe /user if you move that too.
Good luck.

Like the others I'd recommend switching to a journaled file system. As for whether you recompile first or repartition first, they're independent and you could do either one first. Good luck with it