Hi! I’m learning how to use btrfs and I need some advice.
One one of my desktop, I made the mistake of creating 2 partitions, one for /
(root) and one for home
. Both are btrfs. I didn’t know that I could use subvolumes so that they could share the same physical space.
My question: How can I merge the root and home btrfs partitions into only 1 partition that would use btrfs subvolumes?
I’m looking for something like that:
- Partition1 (btrfs)
- subvolume 1:
@root
(mounted to/
) - subvolume 2:
@home
(mounted to/home
)
- subvolume 1:
- Partition 2, 3, 4…
My current setup:
- 1 physical hard drive (1 TB), shown as
sda
below - The partitions I want to merge are
sda7
andsda8
- That computer is an iMac also running MacOS so it has a few other partitions that I should not touch
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931,5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 200M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 371,1G 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 619,9M 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 600M 0 part
├─sda5 8:5 0 1023M 0 part
├─sda7 8:7 0 422,9G 0 part /home
└─sda8 8:8 0 135,1G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 1 0B 0 disk
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
$ blkid
/dev/sda4: UUID="d970eea2-142b-3f1c-9650-5e496d1e9b4b" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" LABEL="Linux HFS+ ESP" TYPE="hfsplus" PARTLABEL="Linux HFS+ ESP" PARTUUID="eab00592-b96d-4ecb-b2e9-816c95eaf860"
/dev/sda2: UUID="6a26963c-eabb-3e42-9e8d-8677a8282b61" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" LABEL="DD Macintosh" TYPE="hfsplus" PARTLABEL="DD Mac" PARTUUID="8257316c-1fd7-4885-bf2b-7e99557acd85"
/dev/sda7: UUID="22f5e59e-8509-484a-92d5-e7dc03bb70cd" UUID_SUB="78a998f5-db55-4a31-9506-afe548ec8d5e" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="btrfs" PARTLABEL="Mint Home" PARTUUID="20b6c31d-5e2d-416f-beb3-faa295af67df"
/dev/sda5: UUID="587b0093-4b64-468a-9a01-b933630d184b" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a47a3fbf-534a-435d-8916-0f83edebf296"
/dev/sda3: UUID="d0c171e8-572d-39f9-8bdc-38f33744a19a" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" LABEL="Recovery HD" TYPE="hfsplus" PARTLABEL="Recovery HD" PARTUUID="c9d0673b-bb2e-4322-9bf9-c661f7de6856"
/dev/sda1: LABEL_FATBOOT="EFI" LABEL="EFI" UUID="67E3-17ED" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI System Partition" PARTUUID="d30954cb-b9b6-40fa-9202-a18cf146f7df"
/dev/sda8: UUID="7027382a-4369-4276-b916-9997c1007e5b" UUID_SUB="3e516464-dee1-4bda-9621-29591d54dc2d" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="btrfs" PARTLABEL="Mint root" PARTUUID="f2fdb8cc-54fd-46c8-bf1f-85954c1dc363"
Can I do this while the system is running? I guess it would be safer to boot to a liveUSB before attempting this?
Also, what do you mean by “After a rebuild of the initrd” ? That’s something I have to do after editing fstab? How do I do that?