Thursday 7 July 2011

Reorganizing Ubuntu Partitions

My personal PC at home died. It was an old PC no matter which way you look at it. Every part had been replaced or upgraded over time (case, PSU, optical drive, hard drive, memory, CPU, mainboard, NIC, video card) so knowing it's actual age is pretty hard, but it looks like "Friday" as a PC existed for 7 years. Checking my blog, the first reference I found was October 31, 2004 indicating Friday was the new name for an old PC called Michael.

Time for a new new PC. I've reused the optical drive but everything else is new in Agnes (from Immortality by Milan Kundera). I did your basic "install Windows first, Ubuntu second" so pretty much just a mommy-install. Until I realized I really hadn't made a big enough Windows partition.

I figured it would be a pain, moving the first Ubuntu partition back on the drive so I backed everything up and booted from the Live CD. "gparted" is included on the live CD and it was painless to shrink the Ubuntu partition, move it "right" and extend the Windows partition. I didn't have to reinstall grub or do anything else, it pretty much just worked - for both OSes. It's always so nice when things just work.

But I will say, it's pretty dumb that Ubuntu doesn't use LVM. As I have posted before, LVM is very useful. What would be nice is if I could have just lumped most of the free space into LVM and then just carved out an LV for home and another for media so I could grow them as needed. Rather than fiddle too much with that though, I ended up just going with a relatively large /home partition and will just grow that as needed and then if I need space for other things - like more storage under the 'doze, I can put a partition at the end of the disk.

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