Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - VIRTUAL SERVER ADMINISTRATION, Руководство по установке

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Making Room For Red Hat Enterprise Linux
269
If you purchased a computer with pre-installed software, the hard disk most likely has one massive
partition holding the operating system and data.
Aside from adding a new hard drive to your system, you have two choices:
Destructive Repartitioning
Basically, you delete the single large partition and create several smaller ones. As you might
imagine, any data you had in the original partition is destroyed. This means that making a
complete backup is necessary. For your own sake, make two backups, use verification (if available
in your backup software), and try to read data from your backup
before
you delete the partition.
Warning
If there was an operating system of some type installed on that partition, it needs to
be reinstalled as well. Be aware that some computers sold with pre-installed operating
systems may not include the CD-ROM media to reinstall the original operating
system. The best time to notice if this applies to your system is
before
you destroy
your original partition and its operating system installation.
After creating a smaller partition for your existing operating system, you can reinstall any software,
restore your data, and start your Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation.
Figure 26.10, “Disk Drive
Being Destructively Repartitioned”
shows this being done.
Figure 26.10. Disk Drive Being Destructively Repartitioned
In
Figure 26.10, “Disk Drive Being Destructively Repartitioned”
,
1
represents before and
2
represents after.
Warning
As
Figure 26.10, “Disk Drive Being Destructively Repartitioned”
, shows, any data
present in the original partition is lost without proper backup!
Non-Destructive Repartitioning
Here, you run a program that does the seemingly impossible: it makes a big partition smaller
without losing any of the files stored in that partition. Many people have found this method to be
reliable and trouble-free. What software should you use to perform this feat? There are several
disk management software products on the market. Do some research to find the one that is best
for your situation.
While the process of non-destructive repartitioning is rather straightforward, there are a number of
steps involved:
• Compress and backup existing data