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Posts for the month of January 2011
Un-doing the partition mess from a dual boot
More and more, when I make a dual boot system it turns out that 6 months to a year down the line the windows partition just isn't needed anymore. But now you've got 10GB+ of disk just sitting out at the front of the drive.
Over the holiday I tackled a shuffling of partitions and here's the important tips I picked up.
- Copy your important data to another drive (an external usb is great)
- Using the Ubuntu disk tools like gparted blank the space where you want to move stuff to.
- Using the Clonezilla live disc (and either partimage or partclone [the new variant that handles ext4]) clone your / partition over to the new space.
- Relabel the UUID of this new partition, otherwise it will be identical to the UUID of the original and the bootloader will quasi load both
uuidgen tune2fs /dev/hdaX -U numbergeneratedbyuuidgen
5.Edit your grub config to boot the new drive. If you reboot into Ubuntu running the update-grub will find it.
- Once you're sure you can boot the relocated / you can add the empty space onto your /home (I always recommend separate / and /home partitions)
Things I also recommend:
- Converting ext3 to ext4
- Creating a Private directory for storing encrypted stuff.
