re-installing Debian

[Adam Myrow]

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Glenn at home wrote:

> But I am sure it is on the same partition, because I just do
> cd /home from /
> and I am in home.

That does not mean it's on the same partition.  That's the way Unix and 
Linux work.  All directories are mounted under /, no matter whether they 
are on a floppy, hard disk, MP3 player, CD ROM, DVD, etc.  The only way to 
be sure about whether /home is on another partition is to look at 
/etc/fstab, or do a "df" command without options.  If /home is on its own 
partition, it will be listed, along with its device, and how much space is 
used and free.  Or, if you do "df -h," you'll get the same information in 
a more readable format with sizes given in whatever unit is appropriate. 
For example, here is what my system looks like.  I have a dual boot system 
with Windows XP Professional, and Slackware 10.1.  I have a large 
"/backup" partition which I store system backups on before I burn them to 
DVD+RW.  Not surprisingly, Windows takes up way more space than Linux, 
even with lots of programs under /usr/local which I have compiled myself. 
I am considering splitting the /backup partition off, and moving 
/usr/local onto its own partition as well.  My hard drive is serial ATA, 
but for some reason, the kernel support for that is under SCSI, so it 
shows up as /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             7.8G  3.5G  4.0G  47% /
/dev/sda5             2.0G  532M  1.4G  28% /home
/dev/sda7              19G  2.0G   16G  11% /backup
/dev/sda2              83G   14G   70G  16% /windows