LinuxQuestions.org - Can't install packages after moving /var

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Can't install packages after moving /var

I moved /var to another partition, and now I can't install any packages. The error I get:

Code:

# apt-get install quota

Reading Package Lists... Done

Building Dependency Tree... Done

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  quota

0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 0B/419kB of archives.

After unpacking 1122kB of additional disk space will be used.

Preconfiguring packages ...

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/quota_3.12-3_i386.deb (--unpack):

 failed to open package info file `/var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/control' for reading: No such file or directory

Errors were encountered while processing:

 /var/cache/apt/archives/quota_3.12-3_i386.deb

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I copied the /var directory with cp -a, and everything else seems to work besides that.

just plain copying will often break symlinks and all sorts, not a nice thing to do. can you ls that file? the directory it's in? maybe that's a symlink to a different location which has been broken.

As far as I know, cp -a should handle symlinks. I did this before on another system and it worked...

About the file, I can't find it in /var/lib/dpkg (I can ls this directory), but I also can't find it on another (working) Debian system I have. When should this file be generated?

Problem solved :).
For some reason, dpkg-deb got corrupted during the copy process, so package extracting didn't work.

cpio is a better alternative:
# find . -xdev | cpio -pm /new/location (run from old location)

Even better is doing this on a read-only filesystem to prevent the system from updating or making files.