> --- Dave Stevens <geek@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > OK OK OK I give up I can't read.
> >
> > But on another note...
> >
> > I recently installed a new 60 gig hard drive. I did
> > this to overcome a
> > situation where I was rapidly running out of space
> > through loading up /home.
> > The new drive is ext3 like the old one. The / drive
> > is 38 gigs, there are
> > three partitions, boot, swap and root. I installed
> > hdc and formatted it as
> > ext3 all one partition, so /dev/hdc1
> >
> > I copied all of /home to the new drive, then mounted
> > it as /home. This works
> > ok and gives me 30 gigs of new space. I want to
> > release the space taken up by
> > the old /home directory, so I commented out the
> > mount line in fstab and
> > rebooted, regaining access to the old /home. I used
> > nautilus as root and
> > navigated to the /home directory and deleted all the
> > contents. The directory
> > now shows up as empty, but df shows the space still
> > in use. I'd like to get
> > that cleared up, the space would be worthwhile and
> > the system runs like a dog
> > with 87% of the filesystem full.
> >
On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 01:31:18PM -0700, George Crum wrote:
> Dave,
> You've forgotten to clean out the old /home directory
> before you mounted the new one over it. Even though
> your old /home directory, on your / drive, is no
> longer in use it still has all those files taking up
> space.
>
> umount new /home and remount it as /mnt
> mount old /home and copy your files to /mnt
> delete files in old /home
> mount new /home
>
> > reboot, but that hasn't changed anything.
> > Ideas?
Given the confusion that seems to be going on do something like
this:
mkdir /newhome
Add an fstab line something like this for the new disk.
/dev/hdb1 /newhome ext3 defaults 1 2
Now make sure that /home and /newhome are as expected.
i.e. make sure you have not removed files you do not
have copies of.
Next swap the rename the old /home dir to /oldhome or some such thing.
i.e. edit fstab to mount the old home space as /oldhome and the
new as /newhome.
i.e. do not mount /home as /home yet. Let it be an empty dir
or mount point. Just mount /oldhome and /newhome
If you have fstab lines like this you may find that you
can be confused about the physical device under things.
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
The above is important because a partition label can cause confusion.
You can orient yourself with tricks like "df ."
$ cd /home
$ df .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 10713248 247936 9921096 3% /home
When you have /oldhome and /newhome clearly identified and labeled
then fix things so that /newhome is /home. Check and verify...
perhaps with:
$ diff -d /home /oldhome
When all is right in /home remove /oldhome you can recover the space.
If it is an isolated partition removing the files will not 'add space'
to /.
If you have multiple users. You can consider keeping the /oldhome
partition as say /homeA and move some users there. I happen
to have collected a lot of stuff in my 'src' dir. In the past
I have made a link to another partition for bloat stuff like that.
Same for system documentation... "df -s /* " might give you
a good choice of stuff to move. Recall that some things
are best located in the / files system.
The goal of the above is to be cautious so the recovery CD
lets you recover by simply undoing a single step.
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
/dev/dull where insight begins.
