> Is it a hard task to "steal" /dev/hda1 from DOS and now use it for
> Linux? Right now I'm looking at it as 340m of wasted space.
>
> The output of "du -c /home" shows about 160m used. Can I do the
> following?....
>
> * use fdisk to make /dev/hda1 a linux partition
> * use mk2fs (or mke2fs, not sure which) to format for Linux
> * copy my /home dir tree to this new partition
> * change fstab from: (not sure what the number fields are for?)
>
> /dev/hda1 /dosc vfat defaults 1 0
>
> to:
>
> /dev/hda1 /home ext2 defaults 1 1
>
> * boot my machine
> * Write Bill a letter thanking him for the use of his software all
> these years.
>
> What do I have wrong? In reading what I have above, I'm not sure how I
> would copy /home to a new partition? Maybe I have to do all
> this from a
> boot floppy without the file system mounted?
The other half of the job is to format the partition. The process is exactly
analogous to doing a dos format. Use mkfs (I think) to format the partition
as linux ext2, or mkswap to format it for use as swap space.
To copy /home, I suppose you would:
mkfs /dev/hda1
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
cp -r /home /mnt/hda1
rm -rf /home # CAREFUL!
umount /dev.hda1
mount /dev/hda1 /home
and alter your fstab as you mentioned. BTW: I got caught by this one too. I
wanted to use a partition as swap and it just would not mount. Had to format
it first. Duh.
