mp3 on a seperate partition?
 

I got a question, when the new ubuntu is released, I'm going to reinstall my system from fresh, could i make a partition to keep my music in so i dont lose it? Or any other ideas?

Sure you could do that or if you want to keep your mp3's in your home directory you can mount home on a separate partition. I would recommend keeping home on a separate partition anyway. Makes reinstalls easier :)

I put my /home partition seperate, but also have a seperate /multimedia partition that contains my videos and music. That way I can share my multimedia stuff with other distros when I multiboot.

How did you setup these partitions??

I have a 160 gig hard drive that I split into the following 4 partitions - root (/), /home, swap and /multimedia. You can even go one step further and get a seperate hard drive to mount as /multimedia for more redundancy.

But how did you actually partition it that way, how do you make sure that it mounts and such. Did you have to create the partition at the time of installation or could i still do it. Im only familiar with cfdisk and am curious how to partition it and set it up to work correctly?

Well ideally you would do it at install time or if you now have when you cfdisk /dev/hd? you see free space left then you simply have to create a new partition type 83 most likely using up the rest of the space write the changes to disk and reboot just to make sure the new partition will be read. Now you would format it with the file system of your choice and make an entry in the fstab for the mount point and mount it. Now if you have used all your space on the hard drive then you can get a Knoppix CD boot with it and run qtparted to resize your partition(s) to free up some space while you are at it you can tell it what file system you want on the new partition then edit the fstab on your install so when you reboot it will already be there mounted ready for use. If you cannot figure it out can you post the output of fdisk -l as root so we can see what partitions you already have on the drive and your /etc/fstab as it now is.

Thank you for all the help, following below is the output of fdisk -l as root, and /etc/fstab

Note: I dual boot WindowsXP on this laptop.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 4093 32874157+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 4094 4105 96390 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3 4106 9729 45174780 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 512 MB, 512229376 bytes
9 heads, 8 sectors/track, 13895 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 72 * 512 = 36864 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 4 13896 500107+ 6 FAT16


/////////////////////////////////////////////

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdb /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro,user,uid=1000,gid=100 0 0



Thank you I appreciate my help, I also have knoppix if it is needed.

If you have Knoppix, you can just use QTParted to resize partitions--just make sure you don't have any of the partitions mounted that you want resized.

You can also follow this graphical tutorial for resizing during installation.

Always back up your files before resizing partitions.

It is a full disk you need to use the qtparted from the knoppix disk to shrink the /dev/hda3 down in size. Now hopefully you want this partition to be a linux file system otherwise you are screwed and will have to re-install at least I don't think windows will see an extended partition after a couple of primary ones. So assuming you want linux partition when qtparted resizes the / of your install it will either create another primary partition with the space in which case it would be /dev/hda4 that gets created if it creates an extended one then you will see the /dev/hda4 and /dev/hda5 the hda5 will be the one for the new space in this case. You would have to modify the /etc/fstab to have it mount on boot while still in knoppix use these commands in a console windows (the monitor with a shell on it in the taskbar).

And change the fstab to this.
Making sure to save the file before you exit kwrite this assumes that the partition that was created was a primary one (hda4) not an extended (hda5) in that case you need to change the file to have the /dev/hda5 and you choose to use an ext3 file system when creating the new partition. Now when you reboot you should have a new partition /music that you can put your files in mounted on boot.

Here is the update, when using qtparted from knoppix it does not allow me the option to resize my root partition. Oddly ever other partition I could resize, but I need to take the space from root. Any ideas on why it wont let me re-size it?

Did you do the mount command I showed you above before the qtparted if so then it will not resize a mounted partition so I would try it again. And do you have any place you can post some screen shots of the program and what it is showing you if it does it again. Also try from the console window sudo qtparted just to make sure it is not a permission issue.

I'm unclear, I'm suppose to boot knoppix, then run qtparted? Are there any commands I'm suppose to run or anything special I'm suppose to do before running qtparted?

This is correct.

Yes. Make sure your partitions are all unmounted. Back up all your data. The partitions will all appear on your deskop. If they're mounted, they should have a little green dot or some kind of indicator on them. If so, right-click those partitions and unmount them.

Then, start QTParted.

The partitions are all unmounted. Oddly The program only gives me the options to &Properties, &Delete or &Set active. I do not have the option to resize the partition. All other partitions besides /dev/hda3 are resizable. Any other ideas?

Well if you used the sudo qtparted in a console window I suggested above then I am out of ideas. I see you were originally talking about this for the next time that you install which you can do of course and if you want to share the media files between windows and linux then make the partition an extended one type FAT and both OS's will be able to write to it. When you install the linux you will have to make these partitions extended ones as well.

The problem is I dont want to lose my music in the process of the reinstall

Maybe I missed something here, but not sure why you want to resize '/' partition.
Thought you were just moving your music so you could reinstall.

Anyhoo, its not going to let you resize that partition at all if:

1. There is no free space on the upper side, so it can't be expanded.

2. The data on the partition takes up all the available blocks, so it can't be decreased.

In that case it will let you know that resizing is not an option-- by not letting you.


s.d.

...now the only other question is what you're using to play .ogg files in Windows, heh.