Hi there, i've installed linux on the same drive as my winXP and its running fine but the time has come for me to install the nvidia drivers for it ... these need me to install the kernel source rpms for it...... however theyre very large and it stops during the install telling me that it needs 65mb to install (which i presume is not available) on the "/" partition. i have another HD which is 20 gb large waiting to be used.... is there any way i can redirect the rpms to be installed onto this hardrive. i didnt initially install to the drive as lilo kept crashing linux was on anyother drive than the winXP.


any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

You probably want to relocate your /var and /usr to the extra drive. To do this, you'll need to make two partitions (usually ext3 or reiserfs formats, whichever your distro prefers) on the drive, mount them under /mnt (as will be done by default) and then copy the contents of your current /usr and /var to the respective new space.

If your distribution also has a large /opt directory - check by doing:
you can similarly relocate that directory.

Then you'll need to change your /etc/fstab to mount the new partitions as /var and /usr at the next reboot (or you could remount everything without reboot, but a reboot is probably easiest).

Eventually, once you know everything is working, you'll want to umount /var and /usr briefly so you can delete the contents from the old space.

HTH,

Samsara
.

Samsara..... i tried exactly what you did and it worked..... theres also a program in the partitioner which does the same thing in mandrake.


Thanks again for your help.

K, this is a bit more serious, i've run out of space on home, i only allocated 2 Gigs to it and it's filled up..... i have temporarily moved a few large files and rpms over to my other driver called /stuff. But if i keep installing programs, doesnt it install it in /home under my user directory? Diskdrake wont let me create /home on another drive like it did with /var and /usr. Can anyone suggest a solution? Would it work if i init 3, unmount /home, then manually make /home on another drive, then copy, then change fstab?

If worse comes to worse i'm gonna have to delte all partitions and reinstall everything in the correct sizes now i know what i'm doing when the new 2006 version of mandriva comes out soon.