[Mageia-discuss] Rearranging partitions

[andre999]

TJ a écrit :
> At the moment, my hard drive setup is like this...
>
> I'd like to move my present Mandriva 2010.2 system partition (sdb1)to a
> different hard drive where my present Mageia system now resides (sda5),
> replace the contents of the present Mageia /home (sda7) with the
> important contents of the present Mandriva /home (sdb6), thus having it
> so I can boot into Mandriva on sda as my backup system. Then, I will do
> a clean install of Mageia on sdb1, leaving my original Mandriva /home
> intact, thus making Mageia my production system.
>
> I want to use sdb6 for my production /home because it is much larger
> than sda7. I suppose I could just switch the two /homes, but that would
> leave system and data on separate drives for both, and a hard drive
> failure would take out both systems. I prefer having system and data on
> the same drive.
>
> Can anybody offer suggestions on how to accomplish this herculean feat
> the easiest way possible? Oh, almost forgot - if it helps I do have an
> external usb drive big enough to back up the important parts of my
> production /home. In fact, that's what I use it for.
>
> TJ

Would be glad to help you, I've done lots of juggling like that.
What are the sizes of the partitions ?
And how much free space does each have ?
What is available on the external drive ?
If the sizes of sda and sdb are comparable, it might be simpler to swap drives.
If you have spare space on one of the internal drives, it would be a lot faster 
than using an external drive (unless by chance it is usb3 -- both ends)
Basically it would be better to minimize the data transferred.
One thing I do is define a number of other partitions than /home for various 
files that would otherwise go into /home.
Like that you can keep a relatively small /home.

-- 
André