Re-partitioning Hard Disk with PCLinuxOS

[laethe]

Hi. This isn't really an installation issue as such, but I hope somebody could help me.

I have one hard disk, 1TB, which is divided like this: (don't mind the labels on disks  )

Now, as you can see pclos is installed on sda7. I would like to get rid of two extra disks, sda5 and sda8 and was wondering what would be best way to do this without breaking existing pclos installation. The ideal situation for disk would be this: 800Gb Media (as it is now), 4Gb swap, 32Gb for pclos root (/) and rest for /home. Currently I have no separate partition for /home, just for /.

Options I've thought:

1) load some LiveCD, use gparted to 'delete' and 'resize' disks inside 'extended' block. I guess this might mess up my PCLinuxOS install pretty certainly, right?
2) Create snapshot of current machine with 'mylivecd', load it and delete the whole 'extended' block and create disks a'new, install LiveCD to new disk. Is this possible? Are all my current settings safe, (root passwords, hidden files etc.)? What might go wrong here?
3) Something else, what?

[AS]

Hi Laethe,

a few hints:

If your is a conventional hard disk (rotational disk, not SSD) consider that the first part of the hard disk is faster (up to 2x) then the last part of the disk, therefore I would suggest to install the OS first, and setup a large partition for other use at the end.

/media is a directory generally used to mount removable media, like external USB disk, USB stick and so on, therefore it's not advisable to use it for installed hard drive partitions.

Use 'mylivecd' to remaster your own working PCLinuxOS, you will have an 'installable backup' of your working system available on a DVD. At any time you will be able to reinstall from your own remaster. I have used this method to substitute my hard disks. You will only loose some HW settings (audio, video, network) because this is a feature that allow to reinstall on different hardware, but you will be able to configure again that HW in minutes.

You may want something like:

a '/' partition say 30 Gb, only for PCLinuxOS
a swap partition lager than the current available RAM, if you plan to use 'suspend to disk' feature
a /home partition for your own settings
one or more /data partition for your own data (like photos, music, movie ....)
some free space (unallocated/unpartitioned) for future use

The reason of the above is that you will be able to remaster your system (including '/' and '/home') to have all your personal settings, excluding large data partition(s), that you will backup separately.

AS

[laethe]

Thanks for tips, as. The process is now done with mylivecd and it was surprisingly easy, there was no problems at all

And as a bonus, I now have a perfect liveUSB to take with me everywhere. This is really cool.