Hard Drive Reshuffle

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Gene Dascher wrote:
> I am running out of space on my /usr partition and want to expand that
> partition, if possible.
> 
> Here is how the drive is laid out:
> 
> hda1	700 MB	Windows 98
> hda5	700 MB	Windows NT
> hda6	1500 MB	/usr
> hda7	100 MB	/boot
> hda8	260 MB	swap
> hda9	1500 MB	/
> hda9	32000 MB	/data
> 
> I want to reconfigure the drive like so:
> 
> hda1	500 MB	/boot
> hda5	2000 MB	/
> hda6	3000 MB	/usr
> hda7	500 MB	swap
> hda8	30000 MB	/data
> 
> I want to back up all of the data on the existing partitions.  I was
> thinking about using the following command to save the data on another
> drive:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda6 of=usr.iso
> 
> Is that a valid way to save the data on the drive?  If so, do I get that
> data back onto the drive like so:
> 
> dd if=usr.iso of=/dev/hda6
> 
> Also, are there any tools (i.e. Ghost )that I can use to help make the
> process easier?

If you're migrating to a new disk, it's easy enough to do this with tar 
(rather than dd), which will keep all your hardlinks in place (if you 
use rsync, hardlinks are turned into new files, increasing disk usage).

As mentioned, dd will not work properly unless the partitions are 
exactly the same geometry (ie no changing partition size while copying).

If you're trying to do this "in place" on the same drive, you'll 
probably need something like partition magic.  IIRC, recent versions can 
resize ext2/3 partitions.  It's not free (as in speach or beer), but 
I've found it worth the money for the overall time and grief saved when 
doing something like this.

There are some open-source utilities that do partition moving and 
resizing as well, but I haven't used them.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net