My /var partition on SuSE 9.1 became full, and trying to free up some space, I decided to move the largest directories in it to an other partition, and symlink them to their original place:

mv /var/adm /fromvar/
ln -s /fromvar/adm /var/adm
mv /var/lib /fromvar/
ln -s /fromvar/lib /var/lib

I did not notice that there was something wrong, as the symlinks were in place.

Soon I started yast to install a new package. Here I was surprised that yast began to install packages that must have been on the system!

I killed yast, and I found that my rpmdb is almost empty; there are only those rpms in it which I installed after moving the /var/adm and /var/lib directories.

What happened to the rpm database and why? Is it not allowed to move /var/adm or /var/lib to an other location, and symlink it to the original place?

But, the most important question: is it possible to recover my original rpmdb?

(I suspect that my original rpmdb is there somewhere, as my /var/adm and /var/lib directories are not any smaller then they were before moving them.
However, "rpm --rebuilddb" finishes in 1s without seemingly doing anything; I suspect that it is because my system uses a completely new (and almost empty) rpmdb.

The above problem has been solved in the meantime: I could restore a previous state of the rpmdb from an automatic backup in the /var/adm/rpm/backup directory.

I also moved all files in /var to an other, larger partition. For the case of simplicity, I used the cp command for that after booting up in rescue mode from the installation CD. SuSE did a thorough hardware detection after the next startup, but otherwise everything seems to be OK.