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wasp256
Asked: 2015-04-28 04:53:44 +0800 CST

Moving / from SSD to HDD

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My current installation of Ubuntu 14.04 is done partly on a SSD and a HDD. The file systems /home/ and /usr/share are on the HDD and the rest is on the SSD. But I am running out of space on the SSD now which is indicated through a popup error and also the upgrade to 15.04 can not be done due to not enough disk space on the root dir.

I thought that the best way to solve this is simply to move everything from the SSD to the HDD? But I am not entirely sure how to accomplish that correctly!

Here are the outputs of df -h:

Filesystem          Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2            15G   13G  1.1G  93% /
none                4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                3.8G  4.0K  3.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs               766M  1.4M  764M   1% /run
none                5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
none                3.8G   96K  3.8G   1% /run/shm
none                100M   64K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda4           205G  6.5G  188G   4% /usr/share
/dev/sda3           481G  203G  255G  45% /home
/home/dan/.Private  481G  203G  255G  45% /home/dan

and from fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00098003

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *          2048     206847     204800   100M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2           206848  493502463  493295616 235.2G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3        493502464 1518438399 1024935936 488.7G 83 Linux
/dev/sda4       1518438400 1953523711  435085312 207.5G 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 14.9 GiB, 16013942784 bytes, 31277232 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x38b890f8

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb2  *     2048 31277055 31275008 14.9G 83 Linux

Please let me know if you need further information about the system! System space of root /: enter image description here

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Your HDD use a msdos partition table that can only hold 4 primary partitions.

    So your main problem is to make room for another partition on the HDD: this might mean delete(backup before !) a primary partition to create an extended partition and be able to create logical partition inside it.

    Then once you have room on HDD, you can use gparted (from a live CD/USB) that can simply copy/paste the whole root(/) partition from SSD to HDD. And after a reboot, it should be ok.

    Or you can attempt an in-place conversion from MBR to GPT partition table. But this is for expert: How can I change/convert a Ubuntu MBR drive to a GPT, and make Ubuntu boot from EFI?

    Note: Why, oh why do you need 250Gb for /usr/share ?? Mine is only 1.5Gb here...

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