Hello all, Still learning SuSE but have been playing 'round a while and am ready to go hog wild. I have a 13Gb drive which is the system in it's entirety and it's nearly full. Have just received my new 160Gb (yee ha!) and want to start with a clean installation. But I don't want to archive off my entire /home directory contents to CD first if I don't have to. It would take probably 10 discs.... I tried an experiment of this once before and scared myself silly. I installed a spare 2Gb drive I had and somehow managed to make it take over as my \home folder, but of course then I could not access anything in the original \home folder. That is to say many years worth of data.... not a good feeling. But I found someone who told me a fix and after I did that (have forgotten what it was) and took out the 2Gb and rebooted, I had access to the data again. WHEW! Don't want to do that again. So what do those with the experience say I should do: 1. regarding partitioning the 160Gb drive 2. regarding getting all my old "home" stuff to the new system? I've got this idea that I should install the Linux system to a clean and reformatted 13Gb drive and make the 160Gb drive all users files (/home/users all on the 160Gb drive). That way I could pull the drive and install a new one with different content in the /home directories. Or have different physical disks for different users. Is this nuts? Thanks! JeepNut In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates? Registered Linux User #287453 ---------------------------------------- '87 Street Comanche #24/100 '92 Cherokee '88 Grand Wagoneer '87 Grand Wagoneer ...and they say there's only one... --------------------------------------- -- ______________________________________________ Check out the latest SMS services @ http://www.linuxmail.org This allows you to send and receive SMS through your mailbox. Powered by Outblaze
Hey JeepNut, You're not nutes at all. I've got nearly the same setup here and I've been through the following distros while maintaining the same home directories: - Debian Sarge (early stages) - Mandrake 9.0 - Mandrake 9.1 (fresh install, not upgrade) - Debian Sarge (more recently) - Mandrake 10 - Xandros - SuSE 9.1 I have a 40GB for my Linux system and an 80 GB for my home directories (as well as a 180GB firewire drive for extra data storage and rolling backups) and the only thing that ever gets rewritten is the 40GB. Now, if I were you, I'd put both disks into my machine and use the SuSE LiveCD to mount your old disk, partition your new disk and move your data over. Also, if you wanna make sure everything installs ok, you'd do well to remove some preference directories: .kde* .gnome* .gtk* And rename Desktop to Desktop2 .. some distros will freak if your home directories look like they have old KDE/Gnome preferences lying about. I could never tell if SuSE was one of those distros, but it's worked for me so far. -Stephen. On Sun, 2004-08-15 at 21:15, Steve Lett wrote:
Hello all, Still learning SuSE but have been playing 'round a while and am ready to go hog wild. I have a 13Gb drive which is the system in it's entirety and it's nearly full. Have just received my new 160Gb (yee ha!) and want to start with a clean installation. But I don't want to archive off my entire /home directory contents to CD first if I don't have to. It would take probably 10 discs....
I tried an experiment of this once before and scared myself silly. I installed a spare 2Gb drive I had and somehow managed to make it take over as my \home folder, but of course then I could not access anything in the original \home folder. That is to say many years worth of data.... not a good feeling. But I found someone who told me a fix and after I did that (have forgotten what it was) and took out the 2Gb and rebooted, I had access to the data again. WHEW! Don't want to do that again.
So what do those with the experience say I should do:
1. regarding partitioning the 160Gb drive
2. regarding getting all my old "home" stuff to the new system?
I've got this idea that I should install the Linux system to a clean and reformatted 13Gb drive and make the 160Gb drive all users files (/home/users all on the 160Gb drive). That way I could pull the drive and install a new one with different content in the /home directories. Or have different physical disks for different users. Is this nuts?
Thanks! JeepNut
Just expanding on Stephen's comments --
I would just put in both drives, and then boot with really anything
(regular system, live CD, etc...). All you need to do is make a
partition on the new drive and copy the data over to that partition.
When you copy your data over, make sure that it is in the same
direcory as it had been in. (i.e. if the old system was
/home/username, and make sure the data is in /username in the new
partition.) Then, remove the old drive, and start a clean install of
SuSE with only the new drive in.
In YaST, go in and do some custom patitioning. You will already have
a partition with your home data, so set its mount point to
/home
Then set-up all your other partitions (/ and swap, at least).
When you continue with your install, and create a new user, make sure
you use the same username as before. Yast will recognize that this
directory exists, and ask you if you want to use the existing files.
If you answer "yes", then it will setup /etc/passwd to point to
/home/username, which is where you mounted the old files. Everything
should be just as you want it.
If you mess up, you still have the old drive, with the old install and
can revert back by simply swapping the drive back in. Once everything
is up an running you can repartition the old drive and do whatever you
want with it.
Kirk
--
visit me at http://www.sparticus.us
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 08:09:03 -0500, Stephen Starkey (SuSE)
Correction:
You're not nuts at all
:-)
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 07:11, Stephen Starkey (SuSE) wrote:
You're not nutes at all.
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The Sunday 2004-08-15 at 20:15 -0600, Steve Lett wrote:
Still learning SuSE but have been playing 'round a while and am ready to go hog wild. I have a 13Gb drive which is the system in it's entirety and it's nearly full. Have just received my new 160Gb (yee ha!) and want to start with a clean installation. But I don't want to archive off my entire /home directory contents to CD first if I don't have to. It would take probably 10 discs....
Backups are a nice thing to have, in any case. You can make compressed CDs, anyway.
I tried an experiment of this once before and scared myself silly. I installed a spare 2Gb drive I had and somehow managed to make it take over as my \home folder, but of course then I could not access anything in the original \home folder. That is to say many years worth of data.... not a good feeling. But I found someone who told me a fix and after I did that (have forgotten what it was) and took out the 2Gb and rebooted, I had access to the data again. WHEW! Don't want to do that again.
Read this: /usr/share/doc/howto/en/txt/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.gz alternatively: /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html (if "not found", install it from the dvd). -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
participants (4)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Kirk Coombs -
Stephen Starkey (SuSE) -
Steve Lett