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How do I separate my boot partition from my storage partition?

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 344 / 1 Year ago, mon, march 13, 2023, 11:42:56

I have a dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 system. The windows partition is on my larger 1 TB HDD, but my Ubuntu was installed onto my significantly smaller 32 GB SSD. Without completely reinstalling the whole system, how can I create a partition on my 1 TB drive so that it becomes my default installation and storage location? I want to make it so the SSD essentially only has the boot files, and the system knows to look to the secondary partition for any files, programs, etc.

I have previously attempted to do this on older dual-boot systems, but I could not make the secondary drive the default install location. Moreover, Ubuntu never auto-mounted the extended partition, which sometimes made programs act up. (This may have been a bug from the older version, so I am not too concerned about this.) However, if I have essential programs written and executing from the secondary partition, it is critical that partition automount at start-up.

I was suggested elsewhere to create a symlink to the secondary partition, but I don't know enough about that to know if it will actually do what I want, or if it is the best way to do it. This may just be an ignorance of file structures, but any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago defendle · Accepted Answer

It's much better to do this at installation time as suggested by dash-plus-java.

Here is an approach to adding it later that may work for you, but you can mess up your system if you make a mistake:

Back up everything. Also copy the existing /home/yourname
directory somewhere handy as mounting another partition on top of
/home/yourname will hide whatever is now in /home/yourname while the
mount persists.

Create your new /home/yourname partition on your drive and format it. I suggest you format it as an EXT3 partition.

Open a terminal by pressing CTRL-ALT-T

Install gksu with the command sudo apt-get install gksu. You'll
have to enter your password.

Enter the command sudo blkid device where device is something
like /dev/sdb1 for the first partition of the second ('b') drive.
This command will give you the partitions label and UUID. You will
want to remember the UUID.

Start an editor with gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

Make the editor window wide enough so that you can see each line of
the file on a separate line on the screen.

Add a line like the following to the end of that file. Substitute UUID
with the UUID you got above. Make sure you don't change the existing
lines in the file or you will be in trouble. If your new home
partition isn't formatted as 'ext3' you will have to substitute that
with the real format.
```
> UUID=*UUID*     /home/*yourname*      ext3      rw      0      0
```
Save the updated /etc/fstab after checking it thoroughly. Don't save
it if you aren't sure. Mind the spaces in the line you added. There
is a space between 'UUID' and '/home', between 'yourname' and
'ext3', between that and 'rw', and before and after each '0'

Reboot.

Copy anything you need from what you saved from your current
/home/yourname to the new /home/yourname (your other partition).

The system uses the contents of /etc/fstab at system boot time, doing a mount for each line of the file.