[GTALUG] Fedora Partitioning

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 15/02/16 07:06 PM, Howard Gibson wrote:
>     Updating my desktop to Fedora_23 continues to be a challenge.
>
>     I figured out how to connect to the network.  Now, it insists on a /boot partition separate from /home.  This appears to be a new feature.  I am trying to upgrade, rather than re-install everything.  I don't recall how I managed to do this, but my root partition is /dev/sda1.  My other partitions are contained in the extended partition /dev/sda2.
>
>     Does anybody know how I can use the Fedora installer to split /dev/sda1 into two partitions /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda6?. I tried deleting /, and creating the two new partitions, and it did not work.  Alternately, is there a way to use my root partition for booting?
>
>     I have looked at my partition table using fdisk.  It looks like I can delete /dev/sda1 and create the two new partitions sda1 and sda6.  Definitely, this destroys my current setup, and my new install had damn well better work.  Partitions sda1 and sda6 will be next to each other, followed by sda2.  Has anybody done this safely?
>
>     I have a Ubuntu DVD here.  When I "Try Ubuntu", I was able to make it claim that my network was connected, but I was unable to ping the machine, or connect the browser to http://www.google.com.  Is this how Ubuntu behaves in demo mode?   The Ubuntu installer seems to over-write boot.  If I play with it, I am forced to re-install something.
>
>     Fedora_20 was a dead cinch to install.  How did everything get so complicated?

I've used the major version upgrade mechanism to Fedora 23 from 22 and 
it worked without any problems. I've also done a fresh install on an 
existing machine on which I wanted to preserve /home and it was also 
uneventful and considerably faster than the upgrade. Here are the steps 
I recommend for your situation.

1. Disconnect drives that have data you want to preserve. I recall a bug 
with an installer in some popular distro years ago that clobbered 
partitions and since then, I've made it standard practice to disconnect 
drives I intend to preserve.

2. Install a small drive, I use a 32GB SSD for /boot, /, and swap and do 
a fresh install using the recommended partitioning scheme. (I'm assuming 
this is a personal workstation, not a server that can have more exotic 
partitioning and filesystem schemes.) There was an issue a few releases 
ago where the partition on which I had /boot was too small for the 
Fedora updater to work so the only option was a fresh install. I've 
since given up on trying to micro-manage partitioning and just accept 
the default for my workstation.

3. After the installation has finished, shutdown, reconnect the drive(s) 
you had previously disconnected, and start.

4. Run "fdisk -l" to determine the device names of the various 
partitions on your system. For example, /home is one big partition on a 
Western Digital Red 6TB drive on the machine on which I'm typing this so 
it's easy to distinguish it from the other partitions when I run "fdisk 
-l" (/dev/sdb1).

4. Run "blkid devicename" to get the UUID(s) of the partition(s) on the 
drives you had disconnected during the installation. For example, for 
the above drive:

[root ~]# blkid /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="wd_red_6tb" 
UUID="b7ee533c-5179-47b8-a575-5a8e9e9135cb" TYPE="ext4" 
PARTUUID="2790351a-ce6e-46a3-96df-7f4be711d171"

4. Open /etc/fstab and edit or create the mount points for /home and any 
other partitions on drives that had been disconnected during the 
installation using the UUID from the previous step. Here is what I have 
for /home.

# WD Red 6TB
UUID="b7ee533c-5179-47b8-a575-5a8e9e9135cb" /home  ext4 defaults        1 2

5. Reboot and you should be good to go.

-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+ 1 647-778-8696