Organizing the Hard Drives

Good morning, today I’m going to repartition my internal hard drives. My plan is to first move my /home partition to my data partition on my larger disk and then backup my operating systems, both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux and my Windows Data partition I use for iTunes and large computer game data. Once backed up, I will repartition the entire master drive to hold my Windows partition and the Windows Data partition. The second disk will hold Ubuntu and all of its data files. I will leave room for a second linux OS that will also use my /home partition for its settings. What distribution I will use as the second Linux os, I have yet to decide.

I will keep a written log of time events of when a action starts to when it ends and then the next and then the next, well you get the idea. Moving my /home partition could take about 30 min. to an hour. Backing up my OSes and the Windows Data partition could take 2 to 3 hours. Repartitioning, 10 to 20 min. Restoring the files to their new homes, 1 hour to an hour and 30 minutes. Then with a few adjustments to my linux config files and a jumper swap to make the larger drive with linux to be the master. Restore grub (linux bootloader) and edit its menu.lst file. So, I’m looking at about 5 hours of reorganizing my disks.

I hope this is worth the effort because I’m desperate for better performance. When the task is complete, I post a new post indicating its finished and my comments on it. Hopefully, good ones. :)

What’s odd is Windows behaves annoyingly well when compared to Ubuntu in performance but Windows better behave after the adjustments and Ubuntu better get better in its performance. Cheers!

Update: Progress Log:

[07:32] Perform a hard startup to windows to disable access to the ext3 partitions.

[07:35] Reboot to Ubuntu to migrate /home partition files to the Linux Data partition.

[08:46] Finished migration, rebooting to backup OSes and Windows Data partition.

[08:50] Starting Backup, part 1 – OS.

[09:41] Backup, part 2 – Windows Data.

[10:21] Backup complete.

[13:15] Start Restore, Part 1 -OS

[19:08 Backup and Restore complete. Starting gparted live cd to reconfigure linux.

[19:16] Move linux root to the right to allow for a 1.49GB swap space and shrink it from 25GB to 24.2GB.

[19:55] Shut down to swap jumpers. Reboot to Ubuntu Live CD to reconfigure some linux files.

[20:20] Reconfigure /etc/fstab to allow for the new layout and reinstall grub to the master boot loader.

[20:43] Shut down, operation has failed. Windows does not boot, Ubuntu will not show any text diologes to dionose the problem. fsck in the live cd fixed a small problem but ubuntu still won’t boot. Will do some research to figure out this problem.