Esther AlterFeb 22

*nothing* makes me feel more like a hot cyberpunk hacker than using dd

My partition table was:

windows linux(/) linux(/home)

The / partition was way too small. You can't resize partitions leftward.

I freed up space:

windows free linux(/) linux(/home)

then dd'd /:

windows linux(/)(copy) linux(/) linux(/home)

then wiped /:

windows linux(/)(copy) free linux(/home)

then resized /(copy):

windows linux(/)(copy) linux(/home)

and everything works! Linux is so cool!

#linux

Show threadARGVMI~1.PIFFeb 22

@esther_alter

That's some delicate work! Congratulations on succeeding without losing any data.

It is theoretically possible to move a partition leftward, but it isn't simple. I'm not sure if there's any software to do it.

Personally, I just put everything on a single btrfs partition and avoid all this fragility. 🤷‍♂️

Show threadEsther AlterFeb 22
@argv_minus_one I have wrecked too many /etc/*conf files to ever feel comfortable putting /home on the same partition...
Show threadARGVMI~1.PIFFeb 22

@esther_alter

How does putting /home on a separate partition help?

Show threadEsther Alter

@argv_minus_one it allows me to not be perfectly meticulous about making backups and remembering edits. It also helps a LOT if I made a mistake in a gui app and can’t find the actual config file (this had happened to me when running the nvidia app and messing up my x11 setup somewhere)

And it’s much easier to distro hop if I know that a) the old distri is totally gone and b) I don’t need to worry about /home

Feb 22 at 6:31pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadARGVMI~1.PIFFeb 22

@esther_alter

Are you saying you often reinstall your distro and just keep /home? You should be able to do that with btrfs subvolumes, with a subvolume setup like this:

/home - your home folder
/distro1 - the root where you install one distro; contains etc, usr, and so on
/distro2 - the root where you install another distro

Then you install distro 1 into the /distro1 subvolume, mount that as its root file system, and mount the home subvolume on distro 1's /home.

Does that make sense?

Show threadEsther AlterFeb 22
@argv_minus_one yeah that makes sense 👍 but that’s not that different than having multiple partitions, right? I feel like in this one case dd would’ve been harder to do because I wouldn’t needed to free up space for cloning every sub volume?
Show threadARGVMI~1.PIFFeb 22

@esther_alter

It's definitely different from having multiple partitions. A subvolume is basically a folder with some partition-like qualities, most notably that you can mount it. But, just like a folder, space is allocated to a subvolume's contents as needed. You don't need to manually resize it.

Show threadEsther AlterFeb 22
@[email protected] I see what you’re suggesting. The issue I was having wouldn’t be solved if I could reallocate space reserved for /home. I just needed more space for everything so even if I had been using sub volumes I still would’ve had to resize the underlying partition.