I was installing 11.10 a few months ago and a few LQ members were urging me to partition my hard drive so separate /home and (I think it was the OS itself?) I have a 500 GB hard drive and ubuntu takes up all of it (not dual booting). Being I'm generally unsure of how EXACTLY to partition a hard drive I would really appreciate a step-by-step guide as to how I would go about partitioning my hard drive. I know when I start installing Ubuntu I select "something else" but from that point I won't exactly know what to do but the members did say it would be (in the long run) the best thing for me...so help? maybe a little?

There is a good walk-through here - http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installseparatehome
just take your time and read, its a little dated but all the options still have the name names and i think the gui is still very simillar.

Follow the guide that Andrus linked to. As for sizes, since you have a 500GB drive I would create a 20GB root (primary) partition. Then create a 1GB swap partition (also primary, could be logical if you want). Then use the rest of the drive for your home (logical) partition. This way you could easily resize your home home partition to create additional partitions in the future should you wish to do so.
Make the root and home partitions ext4 file system. Using ext4 is now the default on most Linux distros.
A 20GB root partition will give you plenty of room to install all of the apps you could possibly want without running short of space.
The 1 GB swap will also be more than sufficient assuming you have adequate memory (i.e., at least 1GB memory).

When you have separate root and home partitions, you can quickly and easily reinstall Ubuntu to the root partition and your data will be preserved on the separate home partition. Just choose manual partitioning. Then select your root partition to install Ubuntu to. Then select your home partition as mount point home. Be sure to choose do not format this partition when reinstalling Ubuntu and the mount point /home for the home partition whenever you reinstall Ubuntu. Reinstalling Ubuntu this way all of your data will be safe on /home after you reinstall Ubuntu.

Since you do not currently have a separate home partition, you will need to backup any data you do not want to loose before installing 12.04 with a separate home partition.

Once I get to the "installation wizard I have one main 'device' (/dev/sda) and what appears to be two 'sub-devices' (/dev/sda1 type: ext4 and /dev/sda5 type: swap) dev/sda1 takes up 496158 MB and /dve/sda5 takes up 3945 MB.

It doesn't give me an option to delete /dev/sda but it does give me the option for the 'sub-devices.' But when I delete them and have nothing but free space I hit "New Partition Table..." and I get a window that says "You've selected an entire device to partition. If you proceed with creating a new partition table on the device, then all current partitions will be removed."

I hit continue and nothing seems to happen the guide doesn't say to hit anything else and I don't think clicking "Install Now" is the right thing to do...again this is the first time I'm doing anything like this and I'm a little nervous...

I'm sure it's simple for you guys but maybe because the guide is dated it's confusing me a little...

I hit "revert" and it seemed to go back to normal so I'll just wait on your responses.

If you have important things on this drive you will want to back them up before installing.
If you are just looking to upgrade to 12.04 without any fuss skip to the end of my post

Here are some screenshots of the processs with ubuntu 12.04
http://imgur.com/a/rw1r2

the device /dev/sda is your hard drive - think sata drive A (sda)
and sda1 is one partition, its mount point is / - that is everything will go there,
and sda5 is swap space - the system uses in certain situations.
so what you want to do, is make a root partition that is 20gb like tommcd suggested (my root partition is 5gb in the pictures)

so make sda1 20GB big
create another partition that has the rest of the disk space, it might end up being named sda2. set the mount point on sda2 to /home
leave the swap partition (sda5) as is or shrink it to 1GB like tommcd suggests.

double check your options making sure the mount point is / for the smaller partition and /home for the big one


No fuss upgrading
Look at these methods, it wont give you the safety in having a separate home partition though
http://askubuntu.com/questions/11047...11-10-to-12-04

Wow Andrus thank you so much for that. That was exactly what I needed. You sir are a gentleman and a scholar. As well as the help given by everyone else, it was very much appreciated. If anything else comes up I'll be sure to post again.

Hi-

I use remastersys, virtualbox, gparted, external drive, and ubuntu backup for the home partition. It was my way of deciding I didnt need to repartition my computer to address the default install.

Hope you find that it maybe something to consider.

later,
jim

After installing 12.04; and copying my data back to /home - Will I have to do anything else to have my new 12.04 install use the separate partition as the home partition, as if my home directory was/were on the same all-on-one partition?

Thanks,
CH

No, with your home directory on a separate partition from the root partition it will function just the same as if your home directory and your root directory were on the same partition.
Your home directory stores all of your hidden (i.e., those that start with a period) configuration files for your user. The home directory also stores all of your personal data of course. From the point of the end user the home directory will function just the same whether it is on a separate partition or whether it is on the same partition as all of the system files in the root directory.

Hi,

Thanks - yup, did it last night and it worked really, really well with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS AMD64. Should have done this a LONG time ago.

Cheers,
CH