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  #1  
Old 18th April 2010, 06:07 PM
demetris Offline
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Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

Soon after I installed F12 I realized that I mixed / and /home partitions during the installation, resulting having an enormous / and a relatively small /home.
Since I want to avoid resizing the partitions*, is there any way to make Fedora use a certain amount of disk space on / as part of /home. Is this possible? And if it is, are there any drawbacks?

*I actually tried using a live usb but gparted wouldn't let me do any modifications. The volumes were unmounted though...
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Old 18th April 2010, 06:58 PM
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Re: Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by demetris View Post
Since I want to avoid resizing the partitions*, is there any way to make Fedora use a certain amount of disk space on / as part of /home. Is this possible?
In a word, no.

Read up on how mount points work and you'll understand why.
http://www.linfo.org/mounting.html
The thing to understand is that as far as mounting is concerned, your different partitions are effectively independent devices that have to be "mapped" to a directory.
Quote:
*I actually tried using a live usb but gparted wouldn't let me do any modifications. The volumes were unmounted though...
I'd focus on

1) troubleshooting why you say "gparted wouldn't let me do any modifications" (there must have been some error or something?)
or
2) Backing up important data to external media and redoing the partitions (reinstall).

In any case you should have a backup whenever you're messing with the partitioning scheme.
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Old 18th April 2010, 08:37 PM
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Re: Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

I don't disagree woth forkabomb, however his first "no" shold have been a "yes, but".

You could move directories from /home to /root/otherhome and then create a soft link.
mkdir /root/otherhome
mv /home/demetris /otherhome
ln -s /otherhome/demetris/ /home/demetris



There are other more complex/ornate/ methods. You could umount /home , dd a large set of blocks into an empty file on /root. Then connect the big file as a loopback device (see losetup) and use the two block devices as part of an LVM.

Yes you can, but no you shouldn't,
Still resizing is the best approach.
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Last edited by stevea; 18th April 2010 at 08:41 PM.
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Old 18th April 2010, 08:57 PM
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Re: Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by stevea View Post
mkdir /root/otherhome
mv /home/demetris /otherhome
ln -s /otherhome/demetris/ /home/demetris
I understand where you're trying to go with that, but in that case you're wasting the partition mounted on /home.

(Also I believe that should be mkdir /otherhome.)

The answer to the OP's question is still "not really" (Fine. I'll budge). Doing that will still not allow the OS to write to one or the other partition on the fly.

As the situation stands now, anything written to the OP's /home will go to the partition on which /home is mounted. If you use the softlink method, you're writing to the partition that's mapped to /. The OS is still not going to "on the fly" use the partitions efficiently.

---------- Post added at 02:57 PM CDT ---------- Previous post was at 02:43 PM CDT ----------

I see stevea made some edits.

There's some tricky stuff you can do, and the loopback LVM setup is intriguing (if not excessively complicated), but ultimately anything we could concoct in this thread is duct tape that fails to address the fact that the underlying partition setup is not appropriate for given needs.

tl;dr: Figure out why gparted couldn't resize your partitions. (Did you install with LVM?)
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Last edited by forkbomb; 18th April 2010 at 08:49 PM.
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Old 18th April 2010, 09:19 PM
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Re: Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by forkbomb View Post
I understand where you're trying to go with that, but in that case you're wasting the partition mounted on /home.

(Also I believe that should be mkdir /otherhome.)
Copying ONE user's account to "/" is NOT wasting the entire /home partition unless there is only one account. Still it's a lousy way to manage space. You are correct on the typo.

Quote:
The answer to the OP's question is still "not really" (Fine. I'll budge). Doing that will still not allow the OS to write to one or the other partition on the fly.
If you mean it isn't pulling blocks off both partitions for allocations for one file - then you are correct which is why it's a lousy way to maange space (per file rather than from a common pool. My second suggestion is a rube-goldberg, but it will allocate space well.

Quote:
As the situation stands now, anything written to the OP's /home will go to the partition on which /home is mounted. If you use the softlink method, you're writing to the partition that's mapped to /. The OS is still not going to "on the fly" use the partitions efficiently.
The OS never switches file-i/o between file-systems "on the fly" - all inodes exist in a single files system always - that's a strawman argument. It's a matter of on which FS the resolved directory (from the link) resides. But it's ALWAYS a matter of where the resolved directory resides - there is no "on the fly" ever. Swap is the only exception but that's not really a file system.

You seem to be missing the point - you can move *some* directories to balance space utilization, but it is a lousy way to solve the problem. You aren't taking new blocks from both FS of course - but you never do that anyway.

Quote:
There's some tricky stuff you can do, and the loopback LVM setup is intriguing (if not excessively complicated), but ultimately anything we could concoct in this thread is duct tape that fails to address the fact that the underlying partition setup is not appropriate for given needs.
It's not that complex, however is is an awful solution - agreed. It doesn't deserve to be compared to duct tape. Still, if you were really stuck we have a loads of great tools that really allow for flexible solutions like this. Say you can't repartition drives for some reason but you really need a bigger FS than any one partition. You can create files associated with loop devices and slap them all into a RAID-0 or LVM.


Quote:
tl;dr: Figure out why gparted couldn't resize your partitions. (Did you install with LVM?)
Ugh - the bane of home users. You probably have guessed the problem.


Of course I am just being contrary here. The real-world/half-decent-practices solution is to resize. Anything else is a hack.
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Last edited by stevea; 18th April 2010 at 09:23 PM.
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  #6  
Old 18th April 2010, 10:29 PM
demetris Offline
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Re: Virtually merging two partitions. Is it possible?

I got it :P Resize it is.

About LVM... The lvm gui tool in Fedora lists all my partitions as uninitialized disk entities. I'm not sure if this mean I installed with LVM or without out.
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