[tlug] Regaining System Sanity (was: Feisty Upgrade)

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

TLUG,

I've got a lot of irons in the fire right now as far as my system goes. 
The networking issues in another thread, the USB problems, and Zend 
platform installations that I'm handling elsewhere, other details as well.

I've got to step back a bit and get this system under control, because 
I'm starting to spend more time putting out fires than actually using my 
computer for my work.

What's become increasingly undeniable is that my system has a lot of 
gremlins in it. They got there most likely because in the year or so 
that I've had my machine, I've made a lot of configuration settings were 
either uninformed or pushing the envelope, and they are compounding and 
increasingly creating hard to trace effects.

I think what's in order here is for me to make a fresh start of things. 
I hope you guys will help me plan these following steps and warn me of 
any gotchas.

So...

My goal is to repartition my hard drive so that in the end what I have 
is two partitions, one for the Ubuntu system, and one for my /home 
directory.

To get there is going to involve a little bit of moving around 
partitions. But my computer has a lot of free space - 250 GB HD, of 
which I'm currently filling up about 90 GB of it. So I think I can take 
advantage of that fact to go about this safely and logically. Also at 
the critical stages I can back up my most important data to my 
girlfriend's laptop.

So, what I need to do is:

1. Resize the current partition from 220 GB down to about 100GB. (Use 
the live CD and gnome partition editor)

2. Create a partition for making a fresh install of Ubuntu, about 50 GB. 
Although I'm reading on some web pages that 5 GB is enough for this 
task. But here's one of the confusion points... wouldn't a partition 
that housed just the system need a lot of space for applications and all 
their temp files and whatnot?

3. Create a /home partition with the rest of the space, at least 70 GB. 
Although that's less than the 90 GB I'm currently using, the total of my 
personal data, minus system stuff and deletable garbage, should fit into 
there.

4. Copy the contents of my current home directory to my "home" 
partition. This part is a little vague to me. I've read that just using 
"cp" isn't quite good enough.

5. Mount the "home" partition to be the "home" directory for the new 
installation.
Is this step as easy as adding:
/dev/hd[?] /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2
... to /etc/fstab? (where hd[?] is the hard drive designation?

6. Leave my original partition up for a while, using it as a reference 
in case there are settings I want to duplicate on my new installation.

7. When I'm confident my old partition doesn't have any data I need, 
delete it.

8. Move the new system partition down to the beginning of the new free 
space.

9. Expand the home partition to fill the available size.

Is all this reasonable? Have I made any mistakes?

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
Kernel 2.6.20-13-386
Pentium D Dual Core Processor