[NTLUG:Discuss] Adding new hard drive

[Wayne Dahl]

Hi all. 

I have some questions about adding a new hard drive. 

When I installed RH 7.3 on this box, I had only about 2 Gigs of space to
do it in.  I have bought a 40 Gig drive I'm installing on this machine
and don't really want to have to start over with everything. 

I have a CDRom burner on the machine and have gotten X-CD-Roast set up,
although it hasn't been tested.  I only have about 26 Megs of drive
space left for the image files (not enough to do backups?) and need to
know a few things. 

1.  What's the best way to go about adding this drive?  Would it be best
to back up the directories that contain my user info and configs and
just reinstall the OS on the new drive and restore from the backups?  If
so, which directories should I back up? 

2.  Does the /boot partition HAVE to be on /dev/hda?  Can it be on
/dev/hdb,  provided LILO knows where to find it? 

3.  The last time I installed RH on this machine, I let Disk Druid
select how it was set up.  It set up 2 partitions.../boot and / with
everything else under /.  I've read some things suggesting that some of
the directories should have their own partitions...such as /, /root,
/usr, /tmp, /var and /swap, among others.  Disk Druid set them all up
under one big partition the last time.  Should I let it do so again or
set up different partitions for each?  I plan to either wipe out the
existing partition on /dev/hda and use it as a Win98 partition, thereby
segregating both O/S's to their own drives, or to give maybe 5 or 10
Gigs of the secondary master to Win98, leaving what I have on /dev/hda
and partitioning the rest of the new drive to Linux. 

If setting up separate partitions for the different directories is
recommended, what sizes should the partitions be?  I understand /usr and
possibly /home should have the vast majority of space allocated. 

I had run out of disk space and Evolution had a conniption fit.  When it
couldn't write email to the drive, it gave up, returned an error (can't
remember exactly what it was) and died.  When I rebooted and restarted
Evolution, it kept wanting me to reset it up...reset the accounts. 
Fortunately, it remembered all the mail boxes and emails that were in
there, but I had to set it up several different times.  I was beginning
to wonder if it was going to keep asking me to reset up the servers and
account info every time it fired up, but after 3 or 4 times (several as
my normal user and once as root), it's regained its memory and seems to
be working ok now (after I removed some RPM's I had installed to clear
some space).  Gnome also forgot my desktop settings and defaulted them
again.  It wouldn't let me set them back up until I had cleared some
space on the drive...hence the need for the new drive. 

I knew I was going to have to do this anyway...so...now I get to learn
this.  :) 

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. 

Wayne