Hello

I have linux installed on one partition (/ on hda2, swap hda3)., due to my lack of foresight when I first installed

My hard drive now has 40gb available. My intention is to split this up, maybe have seperate partitions for /home & /var

To segregate partitons from the install on hda2, would it just be a case of , say, creating a new partition for /home, copying the data for home over to this new partition, and then add an entry to fstab to point to it?

Thank you

In creating the new partitions, they would of course have to be designated as mount points: i.e., a new partition for /home would have to be entered in fstab as /dev/hda3 /home with the rest of the line entries.
To protect yourself, make a backup of the directories you propose to move to a new partition, and move ONLY those folders to the new partitions; the rest remain in /.
Or, copy the folders to their new partitions, but keep the originals in place and rename them (i.e. /home becomes /home.orig, or some such name).
Then try rebooting. If fstab is in order, the system should have no problem finding all its parts. If ought goes wrong; repair is as simple as booting from install cd, rename the folders to their original names, and perhaps remove the new entries from fstab.
Then go back to square one and start over.

Depending on the partition changes you make, especially if you move boot, you should also edit your bootloader configuration file to verigy it's correct. When I first tried multi-partition, I made a simple error that resulted in an incomplete boot. Fortunately, enough of the system was still in / that I was able to do some simple editing (bootloader config and fstab), to get it working.

Thank you for the advice. I'll give it a go later.

Regards,

Keep in mind that the /var partition will grow as you install more software, so don't reduce the size of your root partition to much if that is where it is located.