[ILUG] More partitions for Linux?

[John Gay]

Thanks for the reply. The reasoning for /opt was, StarOffice wanted to install
into /opt rather than /usr. I thought this was strange, but the FHS was not very
particular on this. Also, Acrobat reader also installed itself into /opt, so I
figured I should leave some room for such large programmes. The reason I wanted
to take several steps, was so I could take my time and try to understand what I
was doing. I've grown-up with MSDOS and Windows. All this UNIX type stuff is new
to me.

At the moment I have:

hda 6G hard drive
hda1 2G for WindowsNT
hda2 100M for /
hda3 64M for swap
hda5 1G for /home
hda6 2G for /usr

hdb 13G hard drive has been partitioned, but except for the two CD partitions,
is not being used yet.

I want to change this to:

hda1 2G for WindowsNT, untouched
hda2 500M for /, I've heard that StarOffice uses large /tmp files
hda3 64M swap, this will have to move, but It's More than I've needed in most
cases.
hda5 3.5G for /home

hdb1 4G for /usr
hdb2 4G for /var
hdb3 4G for /opt
hdb5&6, 800M each for CD images.

/opt should be rather easy, I don't think I've actually installed anything there
except Acrobat, and I can just re-install that after I change fstab to point to
it.
/usr and /var will be rather more touchy, as I'll need to be in single-user mode
to make sure that nothing is being used. The thing that really worries me, is
re-sizing hda. I think I should probably copy / to CD and set it up to boot, and
use that when I re-size the rest. I'll move /usr before-hand so I won't have to
worry about that. Then back-up /home onto hdb. I should then be able to just
re-partition hda, re-copy / from CD to the new 500M partition and copy /home
back to the new partition as well.

I just want to understand the steps I'm taking.

Now, you suggested:


mount /device /mnt
cd /usr
tar cpf - . | (cd /mnt ; tar xpf -)

So, I need to cd to the directory of choice, and use tar cpf - . to tar the
directory. I understand c, create, and f, file. I'll look up the p and the - .
I'm guessing the . is current directory? I tried tar -cvf * var.tar and tar -cvf
/var var.tar, but both of these put /var into the tar, so when I untarred then,
everything was still under var/. I'm guessing the p will fix this?

Please excuse the simple questions, I just want to be sure I will still have a
working Linux installation when I'm done. Thanks for all the help and I'm
looking forward to the next meeting.

Cheers,

     John Gay