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Can I ask how you would go about doing this starting on a system where the home dir and OS are on the same partition?

Arnavion 4y ago
With a gparted liveCD and a big enough spare disk / USB drive you can move unmounted partitions around to your liking. If your filesystem supports shrinking then you may not even need a spare disk. And have a phone or another computer that you can use to read man pages, ArchWiki, etc for help. Practice in a VM if you need to. I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode, all from a gparted live CD plus a live CD of the actual distro I use (useful for chrooting to be sure I was using the same kernel and filesystem packages, and because I needed to update the packages and configs in `/` itself). Didn't lose any data or need to do any backup-restores. Just do everything carefully, one step at a time.
- delusional 4y ago
  > I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode [...] I've done this a bunch of times. First from a single partition on a spinning disk 7 years ago to slowly migrating more and more parts onto SSD's as they became affordable, then converting the root to GPT, and finally merging it all back when I finally had an SSD big enough to store all of it. You just make your new partitions and rsync it all on there. The most important part is keeping all of the file attributes, but the correct rsync flags take care of that. Then you just need to update your fstab and bootloader and you're basically golden. It's been quite simple. The key for me has been to keep the old stuff in place for a first boot so that I could easily recover if I fucked it up. I've never needed it, but it was a nice feeling of safety.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
Assuming you are running a Linux distribution, you could install Debian or Ubuntu in its own folder using debootstrap: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot

With a gparted liveCD and a big enough spare disk / USB drive you can move unmounted partitions around to your liking. If your filesystem supports shrinking then you may not even need a spare disk. And have a phone or another computer that you can use to read man pages, ArchWiki, etc for help. Practice in a VM if you need to. I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode, all from a gparted live CD plus a live CD of the actual distro I use (useful for chrooting to be sure I was using the same kernel and filesystem packages, and because I needed to update the packages and configs in `/` itself). Didn't lose any data or need to do any backup-restores. Just do everything carefully, one step at a time.

delusional 4y ago
> I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode [...] I've done this a bunch of times. First from a single partition on a spinning disk 7 years ago to slowly migrating more and more parts onto SSD's as they became affordable, then converting the root to GPT, and finally merging it all back when I finally had an SSD big enough to store all of it. You just make your new partitions and rsync it all on there. The most important part is keeping all of the file attributes, but the correct rsync flags take care of that. Then you just need to update your fstab and bootloader and you're basically golden. It's been quite simple. The key for me has been to keep the old stuff in place for a first boot so that I could easily recover if I fucked it up. I've never needed it, but it was a nice feeling of safety.

rahimnathwani 4y ago

Assuming you are running a Linux distribution, you could install Debian or Ubuntu in its own folder using debootstrap: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot