Was Wondering About The Possibilities...

[thor420]

...of trying to do this. Don't know much about hard drives and partitions, but this is what I do know. Here is my partition table as it stands now:

Disk Drive: /dev/hda
Size: 30735581184 bytes
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 3736

Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext2 [/boot] 57.58
hda5 Logical Linux ext2 [/] 17700.81
hda6 Logical Linux swap 1077.52
hda7 Boot Logical Linux ext2 11893.76

hda1 is my /boot partition for RedHat 7.1
hda5 is my / partition for RH 7.1
hda6 is shared swap partition for RH/Slack
hda7 is my Slackware install (it is bootable because slack wanted me to do that and lilo is there)

Lilo is on the MBR of the disk; it was put there through RedHat install (a different lilo is on hda7 -- the one slack put there)

I have over the past month or so, grown to like Slackware, and would like that to be the only distro, for now, on the hard drive. I would like to ditch the Redhat install altogether. And I feel I need to use a better partitioning scheme (of which I've seen many) than throwing everything on the root partition. Can I split my distro now into /usr, /var, and whatever else partitions after the fact like I want to do? Any thoughts on this plan would be kindly appreciated.

[bdg1983]

Yes you can further split your partitions for /usr, /var and /home. There is a NHF on the subject and other posts usually in General on partitioning suggestions.

If you are going to do this without reinstalling, then remember to update /etc/fstab to reflect the changes to the mountpoints.

[thor420]

Thanks LNG, but I'm having a little trouble locating the NHF on this. They have ones on filesystems, creating swap, making original partitions, the usual, but not so much on moving an entire distro over to another partition on which yet another distro resides. Can I just cp /dev/hda7 to /dev/hda5, say, after formatting /dev/hda5? Then breaking it up after that move.

[DMR]

No, you'll delete or resize hda5, create the new partitions from the free space, and then move the data from each of your Slack filesystems over to their respective, newly-created partitions. Remember that repartitioning hda5 is going to change the partition numbers, so you will, as LNG said, have to be careful to reconfigure /etc/fstab (and etc/lilo.conf) to reflect the changes.

[ 14 November 2001: Message edited by: DMR ]

[thor420]

Thanks for the advice! Sounds like a project to be careful with.

[bigrigdriver]

OK. You have settled on a distro you want. If I may suggest a personal bias, I would suggest installing GRUB as the bootloader (No need to uninstall lilo; GRUB will take over when it is installed). GRUB installs only a small part of itself to the MBR (the stage 1 part of the boot process), or none at all if you prefer. However, for your stated purposes, installing stage 1 to the MBR will get you where you want to go. GRUB has the additional advantage that it can boot OS's above the 1024 cylinder, which LILO cannot do. Once GRUB is installed and configured to boot into the Slackware partition, you can safely reformat all the other partitions, and reuse them for other purposes. CAUTION: since Slackware isn't on the first partion, reformate will also remove GRUB. Make a GRUB boot disk, which will install GRUB on a floppy disk and allow you to boot into the Slackware partition after reformating the RH partitions. Then reinistall GRUB, putting stage 1 in the MBR. After that, do whatever comes naturally, with the other partitions.
Do a WEB search for "Grub Manual". It will link you to a web site in the UK which has an excellent on-line manual detailing the power of GRUB.

[ 15 November 2001: Message edited by: bigrigdriver ]