Making a single disk Gnu/Linux $HOME survive re-installation

Bill Ricker bill.n1vux at gmail.com
Wed Oct 24 04:13:18 BST 2007


On 10/23/07, Theresa Hepburn <hepbut at gmail.com> wrote:

> What about adding a Tutorials section to the wiki?

I'm hoping the wiki gnomes and forums warden have specific plans.

> I'm a bit confused. Does this prevent me from adding additional hard drives?
> Am I limited to  two? Or you mean this requires a minimum of two?

You can have lots HD, up to # plugs on your controller . You can have
one or more partition (1 filesystem per, usually) per drive, or ...

> What
> happens if I decide to set up a raid?

... or with RAID, one partition spread over several drives.
Which you could then re-divide into logical volumes (logical
partitions) with LVM (or maybe with the Raid package?), to do this.
Whether you want to boot from a raid is a scary question, may be
better for raid to be VAR and HOME and DATA, and keep a boot and
backup-boot mirrored otherwise.





> I still don't know what  LVM is other than "Logical Volume Management" but
> the acronym is meaningless to me.

With LVM, you can have MANY filesystems in one partition - because it
makes "logical" "volumes" (pseudo disks or pseudo partitions) in one
partition.

> How does "no LVM" apply to how I use my
> computer each day?

Not much.

But LVM is even more trouble to set up than what I'm talking about AND
gets in the way of using KNOPPIX or other Live disk for recovery or
test drive. And only overlay installs that can re-use it are Distros
that install LVM ... so forget trying out Puppy ...

> Do you mean to 's/^#/\$/' ?  I'm assuming everything in boxes are shell
> commands but there are sudo's at the root prompt (or are they comments??).
> What do you really mean?

Yeah, I guess they should be $ prompts since they've got sudo's.

> I don't have the capacity to make technical comments, but from an average
> new-to-linux user it's difficult to understand what you are doing to your
> computer. If I were to come across this page in a Google search I probably
> wouldn't go through with it because the simple (and probably obvious for
> you) details aren't clearly articulated.

That's useful feedback, really.

> Generally, I Google/Wikipedia
> search every command I don't fully understand in a HOWTO especially since
> the technical jargon of man pages  flies over my head.

man pages have sadly been written to explain --options to those who
know which command they need and not answer "what is this good for"
since Unix was on one PDP-7, before they invented C. :-(  Which is no
excuse to continue the trend but ...

>  The simple layman
> details I look for don't exist in your description, there are simply too
> many steps that aren't clear to me. I don't understand why you want me to
> add this line to /etc/fstab or what "/var/local/home /home none rw,bind 0 0"
> means.

true enough

> I know that's an extremely vague and overly generalized comment

No, very useful viewpoint. I have difficulty remembering not knowing
how computers worked ... literally so.

-- 
Bill
n1vux at arrl.net bill.n1vux at gmail.com



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