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SamCulley
Asked: 2012-06-19 04:28:11 +0800 CST

How to change mount point for /home

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I am using CentOS 5.8 x64bit

I have all my users directories in the /home/ directory, the drive which CentOS is installed along with /home is on 

/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00

And its getting full I have 12% left. I predict that it will be full within 2 months. So what I was thinking was adding 1TB drive to the server and then remounting /home onto the new drive e.g 

/dev/sdd1       917G   1G      916G   1%   /home

But I'm running into a few snags here.

Do you think I will have to copy all the users folders onto the new drive before I edit the mount point in fstab?

So the process might resemble this;

  1. Format/Partition New drive
  2. Mount drive under temp folder /tempfolder
  3. Copy contents of /home to /tempfolder
  4. Edit Mount to location of /home instead of /tempfolder
hard-drive mount home-directory centos5

3 Answers

  1. Do you think I will have to copy all the users folders onto the new drive before I edit the mount point in fstab.

    Yes, I would do this (rather like how you suggested):

    1. Mount the new 1TB disk on /newhome
    2. use rsync -auvz --progress /home/ /newhome/ to copy the data
    3. Swap the mountpoints
    4. Make a final rsync to make sure any new data is also copied

    If you want to be extra save, mount /home read-only (mount -o remount,ro /home) during the final copy, but this will render the home directories unwritable for a bit (which could be a while if the disk is large).

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  2. Best Answer

    One option you can use is LVM (as your /home seems to be already part of LVM volume). With it you just add the new physical disk to LVM volume group, expand the logical volume and finally expand the filesystem.

    On the top of my head, something like

    pvcreate /dev/your_new_disk
vgextend VolGroup01 /dev/your_new_disk
lvextend -l+%100FREE VolGroup01/LogVol00
resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00

    Replace resize2fs with the filesystem resizing tool you have, if using something else than ext3/4.

    This solution is bad in a way that if your original drive dies, there goes your data. But you have regular backups stored somewhere, right?

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  3. Yes, that is exactly what you'll have to do.

    After copying data, rename the "/home" to "/oldhome" and create a new, empty "/home". If you don't do that, and just mount your new drive, your first drive will still be full, but you won't be able to access the drives in your old "/home", since there is a new drive mounted over it.

    PS: while copying, do not forget about preserving permissions etc. I'd do a "rsync -a".

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