How to Move Your Home Directly to a New Drive, Samba Tips and More

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Gaylen Brown

Wednesday, March 15th, 2000

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I have a server that is running out of space on the /home partition. I purchased a new drive and want to know how to move my directory to the new disk without destroying my current working system.

This process can seem tricky at first, but after going through the steps, you’ll be able to manipulate your system to adjust to your growing needs.

1. Install the drive and make sure the kernel recognizes it. As root, run dmesg | more. This will list all of the kernel messages about various devices and filesystem attributes that have been seen at boot.

2. Partition the the new disk using mk2efs. For example, suppose you have added a new SCSI drive and you want to move the /home directory to its first partition. Format the partition with:

mk2efs -c /dev/sdb1

3. Create temporary mount points for the newly formatted partitions. For this example, you might create a home directory in your /mnt directory: mkdir /mnt/home.

4. Mount the new partitions to their temporary mounting point in the /mnt directory. For example,