Home partition

[deadff]

Hi, folks.

I have fedora 16 installed as my only OS. When i installed it, didn't make /home as a partition but as a normal folder. Is it possible to repartition my pc and backup home files into this new made partition (without formating) so i can reinstall my OS afterwards?

Note that i m not an advanced user, guys. So, if you please could be specific in details, i would thank you very much.

Sorry about my english, it is not my first language and kind regards!

[Adunaic]

Hello and welcome.

The short answer is Yes.

You would need to create a livemedia device as you cannot adjust the partitions of the OS when it is running. Do you have somewhere you can move your files too? Or are you wanting to do this without moving the files of your hard drive?

[deadff]

I would like to move it into my own hd.

---------- Post added at 11:00 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:58 AM ----------

No, man. I have no external hd nor any pen drives which would fit my data. I would like to know if it is possible to move my data into my own hd in a new partition.

[Gareth Jones]

Do you have enough external storage to back-up the entire /home directory? That's the very first thing to do before any messing around with partitions.

[Gareth Jones]

Which uses the most space out of /home and (/ – /home)? It'll be best to move whichever is smallest to a new partition.

Working without a backup is risky, but should work okay if you're careful. As Adunaic asked, do you have a Linux live CD to work from?

[deadff]

Yes, i do. I have live cd. My home folder sizes 50 gb. Was that your question, man?

[Gareth Jones]

Firstly, if you haven't already, make sure that you're not using LVM, as this complicates things.

mount | grep "/ "

should return something like "/dev/sdxn on / type ...". If it says "/dev/mapper/..." then things are going to be more complicated.

Assuming that LVM is not being used, the easiest method is to boot the live CD and use GParted to change the partitions. If the live disc doesn't have GParted, install it in a terminal:

su -c "yum install -y gparted"

Use GParted to shrink your existing root partition as much as you can, then create a new partition for /home (type ext4).

Then you need to mount both partitions. GParted will tell you what the partitions are called, so adjust these commands as appropriate, but I'll assume that the old partition is /dev/sda1 and the newly created one is /dev/sda2.

su -
cd /mnt
mkdir home root
mount /dev/sda1 root
mount /dev/sda2 home

Move the files in /home:

mv root/home/* home

Force an SELinux relabel on the next boot:

touch root/.autorelabel

Get the UUID of the new home partition:

blkid /dev/sda2

To make sure that the new home is mounted on boot, edit /mnt/root/etc/fstab and add the line:

UUID=uuid_from_previous_command  /home  ext4  defaults  1  2

Then unmount the partitions again.

umount /mnt/root
umount /mnt/home

If you want, you can then resize again in GParted to shrink / and grow /home now that the files are no longer in the root partition.

[deadff]

Thanks, man. You' re just awesome! I'll try this and post the results.

---------- Post added at 06:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:30 PM ----------

Humm... I'm using LVM. The output of the first command is: /dev/mapper/vg_(name). I'm guessing this changes everything.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by deadff

Humm... I'm using LVM. The output of the first command is: /dev/mapper/vg_(name). I'm guessing this changes everything.

Yes, the commands I gave won't work for LVM. Hopefully someone more familiar with the LVM commands can give some instructions, sorry.