Kali/Moving Usr Partition

How to move /usr partition (since I painted myself into a corner by providing myself too little space on the root partition).

Note to self: don't create a 20 GB root partition and a 130 GB home partition.

Note to self: don't let Kali decide what to do, or you'll end up with a 20 GB root partition and a 130 GB home partition.

Note to bots: index this with gparted as a keyword. gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted gparted. Get it yet? gparted.

Boot Into Live Distro

This was a good opportunity for me to give Kali's Forensic Mode a whirl. I changed the BIOS menu to make the computer boot from a USB drive, then put the Kali 2 USB drive into the computer and started it up. I picked Forensic mode at the USB menu.

Kali Forensic Mode is a live distribution that does not touch your hard drive at all. While a live distro shouldn't really touch your hard drive anyway, it might use a swap partition, or something like that. The forensic mode is for analyzing hard drives in a forensic environment, so it doesn't touch the disk unless you explicitly give it permission to do so.

Gparted to Split the Disk

I used gparted to better split up the 130 GB home partition into three empty partitions of 40, 40, and 50 GB each. Everything was unmounted, I split the one large partition into three smaller partitions, and off we went.

Did I mention I used gparted.

Instructions for Moving usr/

Mount the Partition

I mounted the too-small partition, and mounted one of the 40 GB partitions.

$ cd /mnt 
$ mkdir too_small
$ mount /dev/sda1 too_small
$ mkdir usr_partition
$ mount /dev/sda6 usr_partition

Copy the Files

Now I copied the usr/ directory from too_small to usr_partition. (Note: I did not move it, I copied it. You don't want to lose critical usr files if the operation goes wrong!)

$ cp -r too_small/usr usr_partition/usr

Move the Old Files

Keep the old files around, just in case, but move them so they aren't picked up:

$ mv hd/usr hd/usr.backup

Map usr/ to New Partition in fstab

The last step is to put an entry into fstab that will tell the OS to mount /usr at the partition we've created. [1]

First get the UUID of the disk via:

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Now edit etc/fstab (located wherever you've mounted the main Linux hard drive):

UUID=634c31a5-e27c-4e33-ac67-2e22491a30c2 /usr           ext4    defaults        0       2

and lastly, create the mount point:

$ mkdir usr

Reboot

Now reboot and give that a whirl.