New hard disk

[Ben Scott]

On 11/28/06, Kjel Anderson <kjel.anderson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I currently have an 80 GB HDD ... I just purchased a 250 GB ...

  You'd prolly get better performance by moving the entire system to
the new drive (new drives are are almost always faster than anything
not made in the past 20 minutes) and using the old drive as a
secondary drive.  That's a little trickier to do, of course.  You have
to worry about boot loaders.  It's not too hard, tho.  Yell if you're
interested.

> I think that I can resize the windows partition using partition magic.

  First: Always, *ALWAYS* make a backup of everything before messing
with partitions, filesystems, and/or disks.

  PartitionMagic can handle FAT, NTFS, Linux partitions, so you're in
good shape there.

  Quick procedure:

1. Make a backup.
2. Partition the new drive however you like.  Include a Linux partition.
3. Boot your current Linux install.
4. Switch to single user mode (run "init 1" as root).  This makes sure
there are no files open under the /home directory.
5. Mount the soon-to-be home partition on the new drive on /mnt/tmp or
something like that.  (Yell if you need help with the mount commands.)
6. cp -a /home/* /mnt/tmp/
7. mv /home /oldhome
8.  umount /mnt/tmp
9. Edit /etc/fstab and add or change a line for the new drive's new
/home partition.  Yell if you need help with this.
10. mount /home
11. Make sure it mounted okay.
12. Switch back to multiuser mode.  Login.  Make sure everything looks good.
13. After you're confident everything moved over okay, do "rm -rf
/oldhome" to free up the disk space.
14. Use Partition Magic to shrink the Linux partition(s) on the first
disk and then grow the 'doze partitions.

  Did I mention that backups are important?

-- Ben