How best to set up a separate /home partition, and pros/cons

Nils Kassube kassube at gmx.net
Tue Nov 27 09:04:04 UTC 2012


John D. Herron wrote:
> 1)   Is the new /home partition best set up as a physical or logical
> partition? There are currently only two partitions on the HDD:

It doesn't really matter because the access to both partition types is 
equally easy for the Linux kernel. However if you intend to use a 
logical partition, you should remember that you can only have one 
extended partition as the container for several logical partitions. 
Therefore you shouldn't make the extended partition just the size of 
your new /home but much bigger, I would use the entire free space of the 
disk.

> 2)   I suppose I should somehow move the contents of the current
> /home dir to the new /home partition to be created and in time
> remove them from the distro's structure?

I would use this procedure:

1. Create a new partition e.g. with gparted.
2. Mount this new partition at some location other than /home, e.g. 
/mnt.
3. Copy the contents of /home to where you mounted the new partition.
4. Unmount the new partition and mount it at /home.
5. Modify your /etc/fstab to include the new partition.

Steps 3 and 4 should be done while no application runs which might 
modify any data in your /home folder to preserve consistency.

> 3)   How should I go about making the new stand-alone /home partition
> recognisable to the current Ubuntu distro first and then to any new
> distros?

With steps 4 and 5 above your current distro will use the new /home 
partition and for new distros I would also use these steps 4 and 5 after 
the installation is finished.


Nils




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