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I have a 128GB SSD with root and home on one big extended partition. I want to separate /home from the root-partition. And I want to upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04. There are a lot of results where they explain how to move the /home folder.

But I thought wouldn't it be easier the other way around? /home contains the most data, if it is more then 50% of my SSD, then I cannot even move it directly. But the rest of my root partition is only 11 GB, so I have come up with the following solution:

  1. Shrink the root partition with only 20 to 25 GB (which I already did with help from this site).
  2. Remove everything except /home from the old partition with this

script:

cd /
shopt -s extglob
rm -rf !(home)
  1. Move content of /home to / ("mv /home /")
  2. Install 18.04 on the new partition

Is this a good strategy, or am I missing things?

EDIT:

For jdwolf: I don't know what a dynamic partition is, but maybe this info can help: this is the result of lsblk:

NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                     8:0    0 117,4G  0 disk 
├─sda1                  8:1    0   487M  0 part /boot
├─sda2                  8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─sda5                  8:5    0 116,9G  0 part 
  ├─ubuntu--vg-root   252:0    0  90,2G  0 lvm  /
  └─ubuntu--vg-swap_1 252:1    0   3,7G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
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  • By extended partition do you mean a dynamic partition?
    – jdwolf
    Jun 1, 2018 at 7:53
  • I would not do it that way. I would mount the 2nd disk and move your personal content from /home/$USER/ to that disk. Keep / and system related files in /home on your ssd. Separate based on system - personal content. Makes it easier to reinstall: you format / and /home and mount your partition. See ~./config/users-dirs.dirs on how you can set another location.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 1, 2018 at 7:58
  • I would recommend that you backup your system to another drive before starting this adventure. 'Better safe than sorry'. A minor typing error might delete files, that you cannot afford to lose. After that you can do what you intend.
    – sudodus
    Jun 1, 2018 at 8:00
  • @sudodus: Good advice, but I have done my homework already. ;-)
    – ffonz
    Jun 1, 2018 at 8:04
  • @Rinzwind: I do not have a 2nd disk. I just want to create 2 partitions on my current SSD.
    – ffonz
    Jun 1, 2018 at 8:06

1 Answer 1

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It looks like my strategy has paid of. I managed to shrink my only partition by 25 GB, although it cost me some blood, sweat and tears. But that's usual with LVM2 partitions. I installed 18.04 on the new partition and mounted the old partition to /home. I just removed all the old 16.04 directories from that partition, and my old user data is now in /home/home/<<user>>. But it's a piece of cake to move that to /home/<<user>> when I need it.

Why didn't I do the usual/easy way, just move /home? Well, it isn't easy either to move 60 GB of data to a new partition, while I have only 50 GB of space left.

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