hello again

i was wondering how to add space to an area on the hd i am running mandrake 10.0 powerpack. in the directory var/www/html i am needing to make this area bigger. rite now it is 5.8 gigs used on a 68 gig hd also i have a 147 gig hd on this box. in the directory var/www/html i have 87.6 megs left out of 5.8 gigs how do i make this bigger. or can i make a folder on the 147 gig hd and move everything there. but now if i do that will apache have to be redirected and if so how do i do that thanks



kwick

Edit: First stop apache (ie. stop the httpd service)

Move the /var/www/html folder onto the directory where you've mounted the 147GB drive. So if the 147gb is /mnt/bigdrive you'd do (as root):
Now by default (for security reasons I think) Apache won't follow symlinks so you need to add this entry into your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd2.conf:
start apache again

And... Is there is a data lossless method to repartition my HDD space?
For example for ext3, ext2, reisers file systems and using preferably standart linux (unix) utilites. GNU GPL is a mandatory.
In this case and in many others it would be better solution.

Mandrake/Mandriva comes with diskdrake which allows you safely (lossless) resize ext2, etx3, NTFS, fat32 and I think (not 100% sure) Reiserfs partitions, its a lot like partition magic. You can find it in the Mandrake Control Centre under Mount Points->Partitions or (if you need to fiddle with the / partition) you'll need to either get to it by booting off the Mandrake Install CD and just going up to the partitioning part or by downloading and using PCLinuxOS LiveCD which comes with diskdrake also.

If you want to be able to span partitions across multiple disks you need to use LVM. I think diskdrake supports it but to create LVM partitions obviously you'll have to delete some or all of your existing partitions - its something you usually do when you install the system if you want it. Anyway the LVM Howto explains what it is and how it works: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

But if I do not have X installed?
How to do it in command line?

Just boot your system off the Mandrake Install CD and go up to the partitioning step. Alternatively boot the system off a PCLinuxOS liveCD

Oh, thank you for your reply and I am sorry for my incompetence. I forgot that I have to reboot every time I change my partition table, am I right?
[Well, I wanted to know if I can resize my HDD on a running server on the fly, without stopping it: I decided that if for example I want to decrease a partition that is mounted as /home, I should unmount it, then resize with a CLI-based program, then mount it again.]

You can safely resize anything except your root or swap partitions while the machine is running. From the command line you'd use commands like parted and e2fsresize. However I'd strongly recomend rebooting so you can use diskdrake because with e2fsresize and parted you have to shrink the size of the file system, then shrink the partition and make sure you get them exactly the same size. I've had some difficulty doing that before - even if you put in the same size in blocks or bytes or whatever the partition may not exactly shrink to that size, its a bit tricky.

Thank you, tkedwards. You helped a lot.

Another alternative if you don't want to enable symlinks, is to mount the new hard drive directly to /var/www/html. You'll need to copy the contents to a temporary directory, mount the new drive, then recopy back and it's done