Moving a folder to a new partition

Let’s say you have enough remaining free diskspace on your harddrive, you may want to move directories like /home or /tmp to a new partition…

YOU MUST BE ROOT UNDER TTY AND ANY OTHER USER MUST BE LOGGED OFF

`- fdisk -l /dev/hda –> you’ll see the list of your current partition setup

• fdisk /dev/hda –> the drive you want to allocate the new partition
• press m to display the menu –> it will show some error messages, if you have a recent computer, you can avoid the messages and press m
• press n to create a new partition
• if you already have 3 partitions (let’s say /boot, / and swap), you will need to create an extended partition
• it will give you the opportunity to choose from which cylinder the partition should begin, fdisk will guess the default value, just - press enter
• last cylinder, same as above, press enter –> the extended partition has been created : /dev/hda4
• back to the menu, press c to create a new partition
• select “logical partition”
• enter the size of the partition (+5000M for 5 Gb) –> the logical partition has been created : /dev/hda5
• back to the menu, press w to save the changes`

Reboot the machine

`- mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda5 –> format the new partition with a ext3 fs

• e2label /dev/hda5 /HOME –> label identical to the folder name we are moving, it can be anything
• mount LABEL=/HOME /mnt –> mount the new partition under /mnt
• cp -dpRv /home/* /mnt –> copy the whole /home folder, keeping symlinks and user rights
• umount /mnt –> unmount /mnt :-)`

vi /etc/fstab : add this line : LABEL=/HOME /home ext3 defaults 1 1 save and quit vi

Finally, type : mount -a --> mount the partition under fstab mount --> you should see the new partition mounted as /home