Re: renovate partitions without reinstalling

Charles Howse wrote:

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On Monday 08 March 2004 02:04 pm, thedogfarted wrote:

Ummm...I thought we mounted filesystems rather than partitions...?
Could you show me an example of how to mount a partition while in rescue
mode, please?

let it be filesystems. never heard about more filesystems on one
partition or one filesystem on many partitions

After referring to man mount, it appears you are correct.
My apologies. :-)

A partition by definition is a filesystem (unless you are talking about lvm, but that is a filesystem on a logical volume (partition) that can span multiple physical volumes). A partition cannot be mounted unless the fileysytem has been created.

However, it is possible to mount a portion of a filesystem. See the --bind or --rbind options.
Also consider how nfs and samba shares work. There a piece of a filesystem begining at a particular point is allowed to be mounted remotely.

for example i had to move all data form /dev/hda6 (my previous /home) to
/dev/hda3 (newly created)

#mkdir /mnt/oldhome
#mkdir /mnt/newhome

#mount /dev/hda6 -t ext3 /mnt/oldhome
#mount /dev/hda3 -t ext3 /mnt/newhome

#cp -r /mnt/oldhome/* /mnt/newhome

Be careful here!! In the shell the '*' does NOT find/copy hidden files or folders (those whose name begins with a "." such as " .bashrc".

To confirm that a simple comparison of the results of "ls -d *" and "ls -d .*" in your home directory will show the difference.

now that you have copied all the files you wanted to reside on hda
(probably all /boot partition and / without /home and /tmp) do what you
want with hdc - probably move files that /home is instead of previous /
etc and then edit grub.conf and fstab, it could look like this

Stop...I'm lost.
I was with you until we started moving "files that /home is..."
I must not be reading correctly, it doesn't make sense. :-)

probably i missed something there (as i said english is not my native,
it's quite hard to think in two languages :)

the idea was to move contents of /home that they reside on / of your
filesystem so you can mount it. If /dev/hdc2 was your / (and you have
copied it's contents to hda2) then you can do the following:

#mkdir /mnt/oldroot
#mount /dev/hdc2 -t ext3 /mnt/oldroot

delete all you have moved to hda2

#cp -r /home/* /

and delete the old home

#rm -rf /home

OK, I understand now...thanks.

- -- Charles Howse
Jackson, TN
Registered Linux user # 347576 (http://counter.li.org)
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