Re: [TCLUG:522] Newbie alert!

[Michael Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

> one 750MB partition mounted as /usr
> one 250MB partition mounted as /home
> and one 250MB partition mounted as /

looks pretty decent to me...
 
> Dont' ask me why I did this, because its obviously one of
> the most inefficient things I could have done.  I've got
> disk space useage of 93% on /usr and
> 37% on / and 0% on home.

Wow, I'm amazed at that...  What have you been putting on that thing?

> The reason this is so silly is
> because I personally am using this as a desktop computer, I
> will never have 250MB of disk useage on home.

Speak for yourself..  On my (mostly) single-user system, I use nearly
200 MB of disk space..  Miscellaneous downloaded and compiled stuff.. 
(have you mostly been running as root?)

> I probably will never use this pc as a multi-user server, don't ask me
> why I laid it out like it was going to be one.  If I were
> smart I would have done 1.25 GB on /.  Is there any way I
> can undo this mess without having to reinstall?  I've done
> several installs of various flavors so I suppose one more
> won't kill, but I'd rather not.  I was wondering if it would
> be possible to unmount /home on /dev/hda7 and remount it
> somewhere else perhaps /usr/share and try to optimize the
> storeage a little more.  Any suggestions would be
> appreciated.

Well, your idea of moving /usr/share onto /dev/hda7 (your current /home
directory, I presume) is perfectly legal, and that is how I ended up
with such a messed up mount table:

/dev/hdb2       /               ext2
/dev/hda1       /dosdisk        msdos
/dev/hdb3       /os2disk        ext2
/dev/hda3       /mnt/mozilla    ext2
/dev/hda6       /opt            ext2
/dev/hdb5       /oldhpfs        ext2

What I have usually done is mount the partition in some ambiguous spot
(like /mnt/cdrom), and run something along the lines of 'cp -a
/usr/share /mnt/cdrom'  The '-a' flag _should_ keep the entire directory
structure intact.

then, after making sure that everything was copied correctly onto the
other partition, you can delete the contents of /usr/share, then run a
'mount -t ext2 /dev/hda7 /usr/share'

Now, after doing that, you should put an entry in the /etc/fstab file. 
Forgetting to do this could turn your system into a big mess..

/dev/hda7	/usr/share	ext2	defaults	0 2

I'm not exactly an expert on /etc/fstab, but this should work... I can't
remember what the 0 is for, but the 2 will make sure that the partition
is fscked on boot-up if the system crashes..

Whatever you do, be sure to plan it out in advance, and it should work
out fine

remember, use 'du' to make sure whatever directory you put on the new
partition will actually fit..

Mike Hicks
-- 
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste