Please help new hard drive install

[Leonard Chatagnier]

Knapp wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com 
> <mailto:ubuntu at tigershaunt.com>> wrote:
> 
>     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.
> 
>  
> Thanks, I was just about to burn a partition magic CD so I could do 
> partition copying!
> Thanks to the first poster too!
> 
> -- 
> Douglas E Knapp
> 
> Amazon Gift Cards; let them choose!!
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> 
JFYI, I just replaced a failed drive and recovered my /home partition 
using the Knoppix Live CD and a lot of help from NoOp. It was actually 
easy.  You do need both drives installed properly. The Knoppix CD boots 
up in Kde default and has Drive(Partitions actually) icons on the 
desktop defaulting to ro but all you have to do is go to properties on 
each partition you want to copy/paste to and change from ro to rw.  Then 
you can copy/paste to those drives using nautilus/dolphin or whatever 
suits you tastes. I recovered some vital tax info this way and found is 
easier than other methods/programs that work also, HTH.