Setting up a partition on an already set up drive

[logixhel]

I'm trying to get a system that had it's hard drive crashed and re-installed to mirror what there was before.
At the moment I have the following:
/ (/dev/root) 15844310 blocks 2086820 i-nodes

What do I need to do so that only so many blocks are allocated here and some can be put aside to another directory such as /usr and some to /tmp ?
Any suggestions ?

 

[edfair]

Whatever you do to the drive to create additional file systems is going to wipe out your root.

File system creation on the boot drive normally occurs during installation when you choose interactive setup and you are asked if you want to change the divvy table.

You would normally change things on a non-root drive by using divvy. That would allow you to change start, end, name, and create the filesystems.

My suggestion would be to reinstall the OS. But that is based on the openserver5 stuff I deal with and having done it lots of times.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[patw]

You can only re-install as Ed mentioned.

But - why bother? One giant partition is not a problem - when you restore from backup, /usr and other dirs that were on their own partitions will just install as simple dirs under root.

It used to be disks and the OS were so unreliable you expected them to fail often, so the theory of limiting crash damage as well as for performance reasons led to the multiple partition scene.

But physical disk crashes don't respect partitions - a dragging head will wipe out whole cylinders that cross partition boundaries. And SCO's HTFS or VFS filesystems are fully journalized and very failure resistant in comparison to earlier file systems.

And performance reasons for partitioning are obsolete as modern disks and controllers are way more efficient at pre-staging heads and anticipatory reading of data blocks than the old SCSI or IDE drives. Not to mention the huge buffers now in use both at the physical drive and by the OS.

SCO and Linux can easily handle one single partition, so my take would be to just go on to restoring your application data.

The only precaution you need is good backups using bit-level verified, bare metal recovery capable backup software like BackupEdge (

http://www.microlite.com)

or Lone-Tar (

http://www.lone-tar.com).

(Disclosure: UBB is a certified BackupEdge reseller)

I personally stopped making separate partitions 10 years ago, and the only consequence was I billed clients less for total re-installs when a partition was filled up and needed to be expanded. Good for my clients, maybe not so good for my business model



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