Bdtyktl

I am planning to create a /home partition. The only problem is that my hard drive is MBR, not GPT, and I have used the maximum 4 partitions that are available (Windows 7, a NTFS partition for data, Lubuntu 18.04 & swap partition.)

So I came up with a plan: use dd to transfer my data, make the necessary changes to the main disk and use dd again to restore the data. The plan goes as follows:

1. Boot from a Live CD/USB


2. Shrink the main Lubuntu partition (because the target disk has 73 GB available)


3. Transfer my data with dd to the target disk


4. Delete Lubuntu & swap partitions, then create an extended one with 2 "sub-partitions"


5. Restore the data to my main disk using dd again


6. Follow this guide to create a /home partition


7. Done!

Is this going to work? Because I don't know if the symbolic links will be transferred and I do not want to spend 2 hours for the packages and updates to download.

Boot from another drive

I would suggest that you work from another drive, for example an Ubuntu live drive or a Clonezilla drive.

• 
  

  backup at least all files, that you cannot afford to lose, to another drive before you start shrinking the Lubuntu partition or even better, that you

  
  
  
  
  
  • clone the whole current Lubuntu partition with dd or Clonezilla or
  
  
  • 
    

    make two tarballs (preserving properties) with

    
    
    

    cd /path-to-lubuntu-root-file-system/home
    
    sudo tar                   -cvzf /path-to-external-drive/home.tar.gz .
    
    cd /path-to-lubuntu-root-file-system
    
    sudo tar --exclude="/home" -cvzf /path-to-external-drive/root.tar.gz .
    
    

    
    
    

    when booted from a live drive.

    
    
  
  
  
  

Edit partitions

• Use gparted to edit the partition table to what you want. If you let the head end of the new root partition be at the same position as the old one, the bootloader will might find it, so that you need not re-install the bootloader (grub), if not, it is rather easy to re-install, 'repair', the bootloader.




• If you rely on the tarballs, you can wipe the root partition and the swap partition, and the editing process will be very fast



• Otherwise you can shrink it by moving the tail end and remove the swap partition


• Create a partition for the root file system at the head end of the unallocated drive space (and leave some unallocated drive space for the other partitions)


• Create an extended partition (using all unallocated drive space)


• Create a partition for /home and for swap as logical partitions.

Now you can start restoring data from the cloned image file or the tarballs

cd /path-to-lubuntu-home-file-system

sudo tar -xvzf /path-to-external-drive/home.tar.gz

cd /path-to-lubuntu-root-file-system

sudo tar -xvzf /path-to-external-drive/root.tar.gz

• Make the UUIDs of the root file system and the swap partition match the lines in /etc/fstab
  


• Create a new line in /etc/fstab for the 'home' partition

Reboot into your revamped system, and if necessary re-install, 'repair', the bootloader.

Screenshot with an extended partition and two logical partitions in it,

In this case I reduced the size of the casper-rw partition of a persistent live drive and added a home-rw partition.