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Repartitioning and dell-recovery image
I've had my Dell XPS 13 developer edition laptop for over a week and am more than happy with it. However, I'd now like to create a permanent /home partition, as I always find it much more convenient to separate /home from / when future upgrades or reinstallations are applied (in order to preserve the user settings and data).
Can the dell-recovery image be used to boot from in order to access something like gparted to perform the repartitioning ? Or is another USB-bootable image needed ?
Now, say I've made the new /home partition - will booting to the dell-recovery image still work even though the disk partitioning scheme will have changed since the recovery image was created?
In fact, is there any documentation describing the use of the Dell recovery image ?
lifestooshortto
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May 2nd, 2013 14:00
To partially answer my own question re. documentation see :
en.community.dell.com/.../building-base-ubuntu-factory-iso.aspx
DELL-Barton George
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May 2nd, 2013 20:00
If you are willing to reinstall, you can boot off the recovery image and choose the second option which will let you partition it however you want. If you dont want to reinstall and want it intact as it is today, you’ll need to download a separate Ubuntu image and run a partition editor from that.
Thanks!
DELL-Barton George
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May 2nd, 2013 20:00
Let me double check with the team on the documentation
m3topaz
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May 3rd, 2013 01:00
I noticed that the partition scheme wasn't ideal when I received my XPS. So I copied the original scheme, and contents of the partitions, to a backup.
I then downloaded the Sputnik iso, which is essentially the equivalent of a regular Ubuntu installer albeit with everything the XPS needs, made a bootable USB and re-installed. The partition scheme choices permit "Something else" so you can use Gparted to make a different layout. I think I had 15GB for / - which is more than enough - 4GB for swap - notice how the swap really never gets used with this machine?! - and the rest for /home.
The only thing I wasn't entirely happy about was more in the BIOS. I'm really uncertain as to whether the machine really can be made to re-install under EFI, I'm pretty sure I ended up re-installing in compatibility mode. No worries though as it's all fast and stable enough as it is with the fresh install - and I have a dedicated /home folder which is easier to manage, as you rightly say.
lifestooshortto
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May 9th, 2013 08:00
In the end I downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 (as I read somewhere that you should keep the grub versions compatible between the one you have and the one you want to use to fix it), then wrote it to a bootable USB disk.
Once booted from the USB disk, I ran gparted. Because of the way the partition scheme is currently laid out when you get your XPS, with swap on the 5th (i.e. a logical) partition, I had to remove the swap partition (sda5) and the extended partition (sda4) first. Then I resized the root (/) partition (sda3) to 20 GB and used the remaining space to create a new extended partition containing a 20G /usr/local logical partition, a 16 GB swap logical partition and left the rest as /home. (I left the two windows partitions (sda1, sda2) alone as I presume they are needed by the dell-recovery tool.)
Then I moved the contents of /home and /usr/local from their old directories to their new partitions, and edited the fstab file to mount them (after finding out their UUIDs with blkid).
At this point I chose to reboot, as I saw that sda3 (the / partition and still labelled as bootable by gparted) still had the same UUID and was still pointed to by the grub.cfg file as the root partition. However, the reboot failed to reach the grub-loader stage. So, I rebooted from the USB disk and followed the "Fixing a Broken System" intructions at help.ubuntu.com/.../Installing to reinstall grub2. This did indeed fix my broken system and I was able to reboot into my newly partitioned XPS13. Yeah !
I did this within earshot of my sysadm who repeatedly muttered "If only they'd used lvm...". Maybe that would be an option for the future, Barton...