I just installed a new hard drive (/dev/hdb1, ext2fs), and now I want to move /var over to it. I also then want to mount /home under /dev/hda6, which is the drive that was originally mounted to /var.

Here's my df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4.9G 3.9G 851M 83% /
none 125M 0 124M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda6 14G 11G 2.4G 81% /var
/dev/hdb1 113G 20k 106G 1% /newdrive

Here's /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 /var ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

Is there a way that I can just somehow have /var mount to /dev/hdb1, without having to copy /var to the /newdrive temporary mount point and then remove /var and rename /newdrive to /var?

mkdir /tmphd
mount /dev/hdb1 /tmphd
mv /var/* /tmphd/
umount /dev/hdb1
umount /dev/hda6
mount /dev/hdb1 /var
mount /dev/hda6 /tmphd
mv /home/* /tmphd/
umount /dev/hda6
mount /dev/hda6 /home

fix fstab

Thanks for the help. I have it all setup now.

Somehow though in the process I seem to have screwed up X, as now the only way I can get into X w/ gnome is to delete .drakfw and .xinitrc from $HOME and have the mandrake configurator come up. When I try to run startx, it starts twm and it won't launch anything else.. and startgnome/startkde/startsawfish all can't seem to connect to the display.

try gnome-session

I think I see the problem
all the .files did not mv over
do this
mkdir /tmpdr
umount /home
mount /dev/hda6 /tmpdr
cp -dbR /home/* /tmpdr/
umount /tmpdr
mount /dev/hda6 /home


if you want to recover disk space from old home, make sure you have everything on the hda6 drive and with /dev/hda6 not mounted rm -rf /home/*

Yep, that was what happened. I had a tar backup of /home before I rm'd it, so I was able to piece back in the hidden files.

the safest way to copy a whole tree is ( instead of mv /var/* /tmphd/ in your example )

cd /var
tar c . | tar --same-owner -xpC /tmphd/

that will take care of all hidden files etc.

mlp