Adding a HDD and Moving Home

Linux Distributions Ubuntu
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This relates to Pop OS however as a Ubuntu derivative thought I would place here. (After all I did decide to try after Jay’s review on YT.)

This is an older Asus motherboard with SATA 2 and USB 2. I bought a 460 GiB SSD and decided to install whilst awaiting for the arrival of a PCIe SATA 3 USB 3 card to arrive. Not thinking I did an automatic install which is just one partition and another for swap. When the PCIe card arrived I connected the SSD to that which shows as SDC1 and SDC2. I had a pair of old SATA2 500 GB HDDs that I formatted into two partitions using Gparted and as EXT4. My intention is to move /home to one of those partitions.

Now the interesting part was that POP OS automatically mounted them in etc/media. Bit surprised with this as I didn’t expect automatic mounting and in Media. I recalled the comments from Jay in at least one of his videos on the file system that he mentioned that “media” was used for the like of USB devices, optical drives, floppy drives, etc and HDDs going to “mnt”. (I think that is correct.) Though he dis say that some distros and hardware manufacturers did in fact mount in media.

Looking further into this as I needed instructions for undertaking the “home” move there appears to be an ongoing debate on where it should be mounted, whether there should be a folder on the dedicated partition/drive for, home etc. I temporarily mounted directly under “mnt” and copied the “home” directory across using cp -a /home/* dev/sda1/Home with Home on SDA1 being the name of the drive. Everything appeared OK though I found that the “home” directory had not been copied just the all directories and files below that. So in retrospect I should have used “Home” directory across using cp -a /home/. (No asterisk after / ) This should then copy the “home” directory and all the contents and the full stop (period) at the end would have also copied any hidden files. Not changed the fstab file yet. I note that some use the path in the fstab but I think that the partition id IS SAFER and will use that.

Comments please.

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That should have been from memory cp -pr not cp -a

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Sorry for the late reply, this forum software isn’t sending me notifications when there are messages. I’m not sure why (yet).

For something to be mounted on a permanent basis, I like /mnt. For removable media, I use /media generally.

For an important directory such as /home, I just mount the secondary drive directly to it. I’ll first mount the new drive at /mnt, rsync the files over, then move the original /home to something like /home.bak, and add an entry to /etc/fstab to mount the new drive at /home and reboot. If all goes well it should come up with the new drive mounted at /home.

Take your time with it though.

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