Day 1

I woke up this morning at 4:45 to change Michaela and didn’t see the point in sleeping anymore, so I hopped on the computer.

Booted up and into a updated system.  I had started the updates previous.  My goal this morning was to implement my 2 HDD system/data model.  First step is format my old data drive.  A quick search brought me to Gparted (link).  I installed and formated /dev/sdb1 to ext3.  I have no plans on going back to Windows and I am not going to make it easy for myself to do it.

My Newly formatted drive mounted itself as /media/Data.  I’m still very new at the file structure  in linux and the lack of drive names continues to throw me for a loop.  The only reason why have a clue on this is that my Android phone operates with the same file structure.

Ubuntu has a “My Documents” analog as /home/user.  In this directory all the documents, videos, picture and music are store and also have handy system shortcuts.  So my goal is to mount /dev/sdb1 (newly formatted) as /home.  This was easy enough to do in windows (right click My Documents….properties…..Move target) but it seems to be a little more complicated in Ubuntu.   I am finding out in linux, where there is a will there is a way and plenty of forums to help you.

I found this forumof another chap in my situation.  Seems easy enough.  I fire up gedit and add UUID=xxxx /home ext3 defaults 0 2  to /etc/fstab And reboot.  And then I can’t login anymore.  Stuck at login screen and nothing happens when I put my password in.  The best help i can find is on yahoo answers.  I opt to start over.

Quick wipe and re-install and 11 minutes later I’m back where I started the morning at.  This time I get the idea to FIRST copy the contents of /home to /dev/sdb1 before I reboot.  I try to copy the contents and i get an error that I don’t have permission to write to the drive.  Time for more google.  I learn about the chown command and a quick

sudo chown -R skyjedi:skyjedi /dev/sdb1

I own the drive now.

sudo cp /home to /dev/sdb1

After one failed attempt at manually editing /etc/fstab I opt for a gui approach.

sudo apt-get install pysdm
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
gksu pysdm &

Point /dev/sdb1 to /home/skyjedi with pysdm

I cross my fingers and reboot.  IT WORKS!  Login and look at /home and it looks good.  I confirm that /dev/sdb1 is mounted at /home in gparted.   I start copying all my data into /home and confirm that /dev/sdb1 is taking the data and not /dev/sda1.

2 drive lifestyle continues!

That’s it for the day.