Greetings. I apologize if this question has been asked previously, but I haven't seen it in my searching.

I am trying to install (via .rpm) Samba 3.0.0 on my Mandrake 9.1 "server" I have become painfully aware that my / partition (approx. 500M) is woefully small and I need more space to install Samba. My disk lay-out looks like this:
/boot 62MB
/ 512MB
/swap 502MB
/usr 1004MB
/var 4.9GB
free space 2.5GB

this is all on hda. /home is all on hdb. What I want to know is can I "shift" /var and /usr into down into the free space and expand / and /swap? My needs for my swap file/partition have grown, too. I increased my RAM from 256M+64M to 512M+256M, so I really should up my swap partition.

Anyway, I've bolded the crucial question. Any additional commentary will be appreciated, but I really just need the answer to that question.

i'm not sure this is the recommended procedure, but what i would probably try to do is create new partition/s, filesystem/s, directories, etc. using the free space, and then map the directories in question to their new locations in fstab. i'm not saying that would work -- i'm just saying i would try it.

You definately don't need to reinstall. I have no experience solving this problem, but I know there is a solution. You can shift things around but I don't see why you would have to.

Here's my guess of what you'd want to do, but take it with a grain of salt.

By '2.5 gigs free space' I assume you mean unpartitioned. Just create a partition within that 2.5 gigs.. (You could use it all, or just however much space you need for samba plus some room for upgrades.) Then mount it onto / and install samba there.

Even though you increased your memory I'm not sure you want more swap. I know swap is 2 x memory but that still has an upper limit.

Don't move the /var partition while the system is active. I just tackled this situation. I booted of a bootable cd and chrooted my file systems, moved /var, edited fstab and restarted. All was well. Since there was no user data on that particular computer, I tried doing the same while the system was up and running. (for experiment's sake) Edited fstab, made and mounted a new /var directory, then moved the data. When I tried to reboot system locked up and asked me to fsck when it restarted, which it couldn't do completely so I had to repartition and reinstall.

Cool! Thanks everyone for the help. While it turns out that I didn't need to reinstall, I really wanted to put Slackware on this system (since it's my "server" and all). So, I repartitioned hda (and left /home on hdb) and put Slack 9.1 on the box, using the entirety of the 10GB drive for /, /boot, /swap, /usr, and /var. / and /usr got a lot bigger.

As it turns out, it only took me about three hours (this time did include cuddle-time with the kids, dinner, "The Cat in the Hat", and about an hour's worth of network TV) so you can see it was not a huge investment. I'm informed that it will have great returns. Reports on that later.

g