Hello friends,

Can I somehow increase the size of the /usr partition without going through the rigors of re-installation ?


Thanks.



Prabhat Soni

yes.

you need clear space.

A little addendum to Simons advice: If you have the space, create a new and greater partition and alter the /etc/fstab entry for /usr accordingly.

Sorry Sir I was out of town for a week and did not find time to look up your answers.

It is right that a new bigger partiotion has to be made and the appropriate entry in the /etc/fstab has to be created. But how would you populate the new bigger /usr partition. Would a simple copy from the old (to be abandoned) /usr partition to the new one would do ?


Thanks once again for taking time to reply.



Prabhat Soni

No, a simple cp won't do because it will skip the finer details; you'd end up with a crippled system.

Instead, you need to use cp -ax; and you should do it from single-user level, or even better, from a LiveCD.

Sounds like good advice, did it work?

Sorry, I did not try it.
IN fact my hard disk had gone bust - it was an ancient piece. SO I had to buy a bew hard disk and re-install the system. ANd this time, being a little wiser (only a little :-)) I used LVM to avoid facing such situations in future.
In fact, my last query had academic implications only. May be this would help the posterity.

How would you go about using the live CD to initialise a new /usr partition. Woulod it be:
1) Boot from the live CD
2) Mount the old /usr (physical) partition on some other point (say /mnt/oldusr).
3) Mount the new and the bigger partition on say /mnt/newusr.
4) use cp command to copy tje contents of the old partition to new partition

Will that suffice or some other voodoo incantations would be required.


Thanks for taking time to reply.


Prabhat Soni

Yes, that's how you would do it. Of course, there is a fifth step to perform before rebooting: fstab needs to be pointed to the new partition or it will simply boot off the old usr partition again.

There may be some complications, though. I had my tmp and var partitions under / on openSuse 10.2, then decided to move both to a single shared partition (I couldn't assign an individual partition to each because of that irritating 15 partition limit on Sata disks; it's OK if the disk is small, but if it's a 250 or 500GB, you end up with lots of space that can only serve as a data partition). Anyway, everything seemed to be fine at first but then I noticed klogd was unable to write to /var/run/klogd.pid. After a day of searching, I discovered that this was caused by the security device AppArmor; I still don't quite understand but someone recently suggested that AppArmor may actually register where certain key applications reside on the disk; if you move them over to a different partition, it's self-evidently going to have some objections. In the end, it was easy to fix, though.

Of course, it's infinitely more convenient to provide for future needs by making partitions large enough while installing. But as long as you're careful and use cp -ax, there's a way out of cramped partitions.

Thanks a lot Jay.
I guess I am a bit wiser now :-) feeling that now I am able to think onm y own.


Prabhat Soni