Changing drives.

[aged hippy]

I'm missing playing a couple of games which either don't run at all on Kubuntu, or run very poorly , so i'm thinking of using the drive which i currently use for backups and odds and sods as my main drive. It's newer and faster.

The capacity of the new drive is 150Gb, and what i hope to do is to delete everything on it, and install XP on a 30Gb NTFS partition, then with GParted create a 10Gb partition for /, a 30Gb partition for /home, a 1Gb swap, and use the rest for storage and backups.

The layout of it will (hopefully) be something like:
hda1 (C - 30Gb
hda2 (/) - 10Gb
hda3 (/home) - 30Gb
hda4 (storage - ext3) - ~80Gb
hda5 (swap) - ~1Gb



My current working drive (40Gb) i intend to re-format and use purely for backups of the XP and /home partitions using Norton Ghost.

I'm thinking that - so that XP doesn't get too confused - i'd be better to leave both drives connected, just swapping the master/slave jumpers and their positions on the ribbon.


Questions:
1. To get my current Kubuntu setup back as it is, will it be as simple as installing XP, then Kubuntu, putting Grub on the MBR, and then copying and pasting the / and /home Dirs from the old drive?

2. Is the Swap better between the / and /home partitions, or at the end of the drive? or doesn't it matter?

3. Can anyone see any problems with this plan? or make any suggestions to improve things?

Any input or guidance will be appreciated.

[Rog131]

Re: Changing drives.

1. To get my current Kubuntu setup back as it is, will it be as simple as installing XP, then Kubuntu, putting Grub on the MBR, and then copying and pasting the / and /home Dirs from the old drive?

Are you installing Kubuntu or copying old ?

Installing Kubuntu: I would list installed packages - Topic: Get list of installed packages?
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3085703.0

-> Ubuntu Tricks - how to generate a list of installed packages and use it to reinstall packages
http://www.arsgeek.com/?p=564

How i copy existing Kubuntu - HOWTO: Copy kubuntu system
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=11116.0

2. Is the Swap better between the / and /home partitions, or at the end of the drive? or doesn't it matter?

I don't think that there is big difference. Is you system swapping lot ?.

Swap Partition FAQ
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

3. Can anyone see any problems with this plan? or make any suggestions to improve things?

Well - you have separate root and home partitions. That is the most important thing ! I only have small home partition (10G), the rest is data partitions.

[aged hippy]

Re: Changing drives.

Thank you for the reply, Rog131, i apologise for the delay in responding, sometimes the Outside World demands attention....

I decided to go for a complete re-install on the new drive, then copied the /home directory across, keeping / separate.

The only problem i've had is that i couldn/t create a /swap, all i could have is hda1 (C, hda2 (/), hda3 (/home), hda4 (storage) anything else was "Unusable" according to QTparted.

It seems that if i need one, i can create a swap file on disk, although things are running smoothly at the moment so it may not be necessary.

[mchuskie]

Re: Changing drives.

Ah, you've come across a really silly limit from back in the days when hard drives were measured in tens of megabytes...

You can only have a maximum of four primary partitions on a drive. If you want more partitions than that, you must create one of them as an extended partition, and create further subpartitions of that.

[Rog131]

Re: Changing drives.

As JamesM said: Only 4 X Primary.


More:

Linux Partition HOWTO
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/

3.3. Primary Partitions

The number of partitions on an Intel-based system was limited from the very beginning: The original partition table was installed as part of the boot sector and held space for only four partition entries. These partitions are now called primary partitions.

3.4. Logical Partitions

One primary partition of a hard drive may be subpartitioned. These are logical partitions. This effectively allows us to skirt the historical four partition limitation.

The primary partition used to house the logical partitions is called an extended partition and it has its own file system type (0x05). Unlike primary partitions, logical partitions must be contiguous. Each logical partition contains a pointer to the next logical partition, which implies that the number of logical partitions is unlimited. However, linux imposes limits on the total number of any type of partition on a drive, so this effectively limits the number of logical partitions. This is at most 15 partitions total on an SCSI disk and 63 total on an IDE disk.

The Linux System Administrators' Guide
http://www.linuxhq.com/guides/SAG/book1.html

Partitions
http://www.linuxhq.com/guides/SAG/x885.html

[dibl]

Re: Changing drives.

You could put a 1GB swap partition on the old 40GB drive and probably not lose any performance, since it sounds like your system doesn't use swap a lot. That way you could leave your 4 primary partitions on the new drive.

[aged hippy]

Re: Changing drives.

Thanks for the info, JamesM and Rog131, i'd guessed that may well be something along those lines....

@dibl - it's already got a /swap on there from the previous installation, but it's unused at the moment. I'd thought about adding an NTFS partion to backup hda1 (C onto (with Norton Ghost), and one ext3 for /home backups via Keep.
Presumably the ext3 would have to be mounted as /media or /usr.