I have a 3Gig partition and my Debian Install is using up 85% of it (hda1).

So I tried to copy my /usr amd /var directories to /mnt/hda3 and created appropriate symlinks using:
ln -s /usr /mnt/hda3/usr

. It failed to work.

For now I redid all the changes. Any suggestions to remedy the problem are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Vijay

Iwould suggest doing the following;

1. create the file system

2. edit fstab to reflect the new location of the directories

3. mount the partition on mnt

4. go into single user mode do init 1

5 use rsync to do the following rsync -avH /usr/ /mnt and rsync -avH /var/ /mnt

6. reboot the system

Please give detailed steps for number 4. How do I go into single user mode ?

For 5. do I type avH just like that in the entire command or does it represent something else ?

Thanks.

Vijay

You need to be completely out of gui and as root and issue the command init 1

the command rsync -avH /usr/ /mnt interprets as synchronise -a=archive v=verbose H=preserve hard links and note the trailing / which is important. What rsync does is compile a list of files and their sizes and then checks if they are present on the destination and then writes them over. rsync is a very powerful tool capable of doing the same job over a network as well and in encrypted format as well. Just out of interest you can find out more at ; http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/r...apshots/#Rsync
It has been a while since I used it but having done the first directory /usr check /mnt/usr to see if it has created all correctly.