My main root parition was only made with about 5 gigs, and it is filled up :O

Today, i deleted my old RH install off my second hard drive, SO i have a whole bunch of unpartitioned space.

Is there a way for me to move my / parition to my second drive, and thereby letting it grow in size?

I mean, Say i create a 10 gig ext3 partition on my second drive:
I need to
a) Copy all the data exactly from my 5 gig partition to the new 10 gig one
the
b) Set it up so the new parition is viewed as the / partition

How exactly should I do this?

THanks

I think that:

It is your root partition? hmmm

To make it simple, grab a copy of Symantec Ghost or Powerquest drive image. Then make a disk-to-disk copy.

Or maybe try www.mondorescue.org

If you still want to try the hard way, I don't really know exactly how to do it.

I don't see any problem, simply mount the new partition on, e.g., new, and launch as root a You'll get an error message at the end, but that's no problem.
Then you'll have to update 2 things BEFORE rebooting:
1. your lilo or grub conf file. In the first case,, remember to re-run lilo. In the latter, be sure to remove the old grub.conf or menu.lst on hda, or that will be used instead
2. your /etc/fstab of course
After rebooting you can get rid of old partition

Note that you can even safely move some branches, too. Say you want to move only /usr:or you can instruct /etc/fstab to mount hdb1 as /usr

Hm....i made a /new partition...a couple questions thought

Im looking at man cp

-a, --archive
Preserve as much as possible of the structure and
attributes of the original files in the copy (but
do not preserve directory structure). Equivalent
to -dpR.

WHat does that mean, does not preverse direcotry structure? Dont i need that?

Also,
What do you mean, I will get an error but that doesn't matter?

thanks

I did this recently with Mandrake and Gentoo, I used the command cp -rp from a Gentoo bootable CD. I had no errors and no problems since. It copies all directories and keep the permissions the same.

That is my experience. What ever that is worth.

Later

So i made it start last night, before i went to bed

It ran ot of space, because it was trying to copy all info in /mnt
SO i deleted /new/mnt
And I'm going to try to copy the rest after.

I guess then I should create a /new/mnt and setup mout points...

In Windows 2000, you can define "volume mount points" which are "used to graft new volumes into the existing file system namespace without requiring the use of a drive letter." In other words, the same volume can reside on more than one physical partition or disk. I believe Linux can do the same with LVM. I have no idea how to use it, but the general concept is still the same- you wouldn't have to copy your partition over, just logically tack additional space onto it. Anyone know how exactly to do this?

I get an error message and it just hangs when copying /proc
414M proc
386M proc

Should I worry about this?

I just tried this today myself. I was unable to get it to work either when attempting to copy the partition that my system was booted on. I finally booted with MEPIS (similar to Knoppix) and mounted the two partitions, and copied the populated partition to the empty one, using the method already described.

That proably would have been cleaner, eh?

Anyways, my proc's were different, but it seems like it worked because I am wokring in the new partition now!

I'll keep the old one for a few days to make everything runs ok, but everything seems fine from here....

whats about mounting the new HD and then dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb and then copying over the MBR if you plan to boot off the second HD. Also, remember to edit your boootloader.

I assume you running that OS when you tried that. I would never copy files from a OS that is running, well not when cloning anyway. There will always be files that are locked, in use etc and won't copy. You should do that from a bootable CD to make sure it gets everything.

Also note, copying the files will not copy the bootloader. You will have to install that. You may need to chroot over and install it after you swap the drives and put it like the new setup.

Any of that make sense?

Yea, i realized after that I should have doen it from a bootable cd...but it seemed to work

I didn't hav eot worry about the bootloader, since it was in it's own partition from the start