Manipulating disk-partitions is scary. The programs that do these things
are somewhat mysterious and you can loose a lot of work and time. If you
use something like qtparted and don’t know what you did wrong, read on. I
had a struggle to realize that “mounted” and “status Active” is the same.
Ubuntu,Linux
My setup, my partitions
A DELL-laptop with an 80Gb disk. The first 2 partitions are for
Dell-rescue and Windows-NT. Then there follows a ‘logical’ or ‘extented’
partition with partitions for my Debian Kubuntu, a partition for my
‘/home’ directory and a spare partition for another Linux-OS in the
future. Then I have another primary partition for Linux-swap.
My system in time
My system is organic in the sense that it changes according to my needs
and knowledge. I never thought of a ‘/home’ directory on an own
partition, but my Ubuntu system grew almost over it’s physical space
of its partition of 10Gb.
The reason that it grew so fast was that there was this backup-program
called ‘Backup Manager’ that made every day a backup of the whole Ubuntu
system. Default the Backup Manager program stores it’s files
in ‘/var/archives’. This program starts working as soon as you install it
by help of synaptic or whatever program you use to get your
deb-files installed.
I needed more space…
....and decided to install my ‘/home’ directory on another partition. My
argument is that I have a lot of big files in my /home-dir (sound and
photos). It’s easier to control, to back-up and most of the data
in /home is OS-independent.
The installation of /home on a different partition
There are some good instructions to find to do just that. But I still
ran into problems. Not because of the instructions, but because of the
use of different terms for the same definition in programs like
qtparted.
The instruction I used to move the /home dir to its own partition is to
find at:
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/01/29/move-home-to-its-own-partition/
The instruction starts by saying:
“First, create a partition of sufficient size for your “/home”
directory. You may have to use that new hard drive, or adjust/resize the
existing partition on your current hard-drive to do this. Let me skip
those details.”
And the devil was in those skipped details…
I started up qtparted while running Ubuntu and when I wanted to
commit the formatting in ext3 of the partition that soon was to become
my new /home, it came with this message:
Message of qtparted:
You’re committing all changes. Warning, you can lost data! Make sure
also that you’re not commiting a busy device… In other word PLEASE UMOUNT
ALL PARTITIONS before commiting changes! [Yes][No]
Comment:
I’ve met this message a few times and didn’t know what they wanted me to
understand. There are so many syntax-, grammatical- and logical- errors in
this message that that made me extra nervous. If the message is so clumsy,
what about the program? Does this program really take care of my precious
data?
Real misunderstanding:
Umount is a linux-command to unmount disk-partitions.
In qtparted there is an indication of the status of a
disk-partition. It is nothing or ‘Active’.
My interpretation of the message, right now, is that it is not allowed
to have a partition with the status ‘Active’ on the same disk as you
start manipulating.
If you continue to manipulate a partition in qtparted with any partition
on that disk with status ‘Active’ you will end up with a mess.
For example:
- I intended to format partition ‘/dev/sda8’ and it was ‘/dev/sda7’
that got formatted - You can only manipulate one item at a time in qtparted, and then you
have to reboot the whole system
So, I decide to use a Knoppix CD…
....and thought that if I do the manipulation of partitions of the
hard-disk like that there would be no problem. Still there was the
ntfs partition that was active, but I didn’t realize that active
means the same as mounted.
The same things as before happened like being able to manipulate only
once and then a reboot is needed.
UMOUNT means change the status of the active partition to
not-active!
Start up with the Knoppix-CD or with the installation-CD of Ubuntu.
Go to qtparted (or do the manual ‘install on partition’ of the
installation-CD, but only the first part…).
When in _gtparted do:
#. Set the status of the active partition OFF, and then go ahead
with formatting the partitions
#. Commit your intended changes
#. The last thing to do is to set the status of the partition back to
Active
#. Commit this change
#. Quit the program, reboot your normal system and start doing the
things you wanted to do with your new partition (like
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/01/29/move-home-to-its-own-partition/ )
