Post #3589728

2026-07-04 20:39 UTC

I’d rather have a single large /home partition, and the LVM method sounds less risky if I find out how to do it safely. I am sure I read somewhere that LVM is the clean way to manage partitions. I see my fstab says the following, so it’s UUIDs although I am not sure about that /swapfile: # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=9178d5fa-87a7-4e65-ba88-726f41c84186 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /boot/efi was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=0B9E-D68E /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 1 # /home was on /dev/sda8 during installation UUID=0a3aa38a-1673-4064-b573-9a090be7f3cb /home ext4 defaults 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation # UUID=ca915564-2474-4399-ae6c-b4d9b73e69d1 none swap sw 0 0 # # added swapfile /swapfile none swap sw 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /media/myuser/backintime ext4 nofail 0 0

Replies (1)

@IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2026-07-04 21:40

Swapfile refers to a file at /. As long as you have rootfs there’s a place to put that swap file too, so no worries there. Usually there’s a separate partition for swap, but that works too. So, what you need to do is remove sda1 and sda2 windows partitions. That’ll leave you ~520GB of unallocated space at the start of the drive. Create a partition there and set it to ‘Linux LVM’ -type. Then create LVM ‘filesystem’ on that partition, or more accurately, assign that partition as an LVM physical volume with ‘pvcreate’. After that you need to create a volume group with ‘lvcreate’. Now you’ll have 520GB allocated to LVM. Create new partition for your home with ‘lvcreate’, use all the space if you like, but at least as big as your current consumption on /home. Then create an filesystem on it and mount it as /mnt/newhome (or whatever). Log out with your main user and make sure there’s no processes running on that user afterwards. Then you can copy data from current home to newhome and unmount the now old home (sda8). Change fstab so that your new home will be mounted on /home (blkid to get UUID and change that to fstab). Mount new home in it’s proper place, old home partition will be unmounted at this stage. Verify that everything works. Now you can change your current sda8, a.k.a. old home, to Linux LVM-type, assign that as LVM physical volume and extend your volume group with vgextend to include the another partition. And now with lvextend you can expand your brand new home directory to that ~850GB total. But, as I mentioned, make sure that you have your backups in good shape. These steps, if done incorrectly, will destroy your data. That’s also why I’m being somewhat vague on the instructions, you’ll need to understand what you’re doing. There’s plenty of information to push you in the right direction, but trust me, it’s better for you to take a minute or two and read documentation so that you’re actually confident on the steps.

Open ##3591019