Please help new hard drive install

[Rashkae]

Knapp wrote:
> Hello, I just got a new 750gb hd. My old hd is 170gb or so. I would like to
> do 2 things. First and foremost, I would like to move my home dir to the new
> drive.
> 
> The new drive is now partitioned with a 8gb swap and then a 3ext section. I
> would also like to make a small partition for doing things like installing
> 8.10 for testing out the new kde 4, so some sort of duel boot but only with
> linux. I don't use windows at all save for a bit of wine.
> 
> I used gparted to get this far and I see how I could mount it but how do you
> copy and move the home partition??
> 
> Also I welcome any advice about how to set this up so my computer runs
> faster by having the right partitions on the right drives!
> 
> BTW it is all sata II
> 
> Thanks for any help!
> 
> 

Copying of your home partition should be done in single user / rescue
mode.  (You should be able to access this mode by Pressing ESC during
grub start sequence to see menu.)

Then you mount your new partition, ex:

mkdir /mnt/target

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/target  (making sure that sdb2 is indeed
the correct partition for your new drive.)

cp -a /home/. /mnt/target/

When the copy is done, you can edit fstab to mount the new partition as
home.


As far as organizing your hard drives for performance, I'm not sure if
there are absolute rules, but here are some things to keep in mind as
you are experimenting.

The new hard drive will most certainly be faster than the old one.  So
stuff you want to work faster should be ported to the new drive.

you can test this yourself with hdparm

hdparm -tT /dev/sda
hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

The other point to keep in mind is that the start of the drive will be
much much faster than the end of the hard drive.  That is, a small 20GB
partition at the start of your old 170GB drive is probably much faster
than a small 20GB partition at the end of your new drive, even though
the new drive is faster overall.

Personally, I like to keep my swap partitions at the start of the drive,
since I find a swap storm to be the most performance killing IO
operation that affects interactivity. (ie, unlike loading programs or
copying large files, Swap I/O will cause my already running programs to
stutter and be unresponsive).  The other school of thought I've heard is
to keep swap partitions in the middle of your drive, that way, IO
operations that need to read/write to both swap and filesystem on the
same drive will only need to move the hard drive head, at most, half
stroke across the platter, whereas if the swap is at either end of the
platter, the potential distance between File system IO and Swap IO is
the entire drive  (and keeping in mind that seek time for the hard drive
head is the largest performance bottleneck of any modern computer)

If you have swap space on both hard drives, edit your fstab file so each
swap partition has the pri=0 option.

Ex:

UUID=61c46e3e-a646-4750-9729-e08212371a6f none  swap   pri=0   0  0


If both Swaps are given the same priority, Linux will balance the load
between them evenly.