Moving /home to another disk

I have two hard drives in my computer: one with the / partition and the swap partition, and another with the /home partition.

The hard drive with the /home partition was getting full, so I bought another one.

Here’s what I did to move the /home partition to the new hard drive:

• Replace the old drive for the new one.
• Connect the old drive to another sata port. This way the new drive is in the right place and after moving the /home partition I just have to remove the old drive.
• Boot computer.
• Create a new Extended Partition in the new drive (I used GParted) with a primary partition inside. At this point there is no mount point to this new partition. The new partition in this case is /dev/sdb5.

• Get the UUID for the new partition:

1sudo blkid

• It will be something like:

1/dev/sdb5: UUID="**aa111aaa-1122-aaaa-9999-cccc44447777**" TYPE="ext4"

• Backup your /etc/fstab file:

1sudo cp /etc/fstab/etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

• Create a new folder to mount the new partition:

1sudo mkdir /media/home

• Edit you /etc/fstab file in order to mount the new partition in the new folder:

1gksu gedit /etc/fstab

• Add the following, using your UUID

1UUID=**aa111aaa-1122-aaaa-9999-cccc44447777** /media/home    ext4          nodev,nosuid       0       2

• Mount the new partition:

1sudo mount -a

• Copy your /home partition to the new /media/home partition. At this point I disconnected the computer from my LAN so nothing changes:

1sudo rsync -axS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/. /media/home/.

• Compare the two partitions:

1sudo diff -r /home /media/home > ~/diff.txt

• Analyze the differences to see if you have to copy something else:

1gedit ~/diff.txt

• Edit you /etc/fstab file again in order to mount the new partition in the /home folder:

1UUID=**aa111aaa-1122-aaaa-9999-cccc44447777** /home ext4 nodev,nosuid 0 2

• Move the current /home to a /old_home folder. I had to go to a terminal session in order to do this (Ctrl+Alt+F5 to go to the terminal, Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back):

1cd / && sudo mv /home /old_home && cd / && sudo mkdir -p /home

• Reboot.
• After checking everything is allright, remove the /old_home folder:

1cd /
2sudo rm -r /old_home

• You can now halt your computer and remove the old hard drive.

More information about this subject, look up Ubuntu Documentation.