[Mageia-discuss] Rearranging partitions

[TJ]

On 07/22/2011 07:03 AM, andre999 wrote:
> 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.
>
Sda is quite a bit smaller than sdb, and also contains a 48GB Windows XP 
partition which I'd rather leave alone for the time being. The Mandriva 
and Mageia system partitions are both 12GB. The Mandriva system 
partition has 5.6 GB of open space, and the Mageia partition shouldn't 
be quite that full. Sda7 is 88GB, while sdb6 is 215GB. Sdb6 currently 
has 96 GB on it, but if I do some much-needed housekeeping I could 
reduce that to fit on sda7 with room to spare. The external drive is 
usb2, and 160GB.

TJ