I have a weird feeling this is going to be a total newbie question... =(

Situation:
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I've acquired a new 120 GB Harddisk. Onto that I intend to throw all my "non-system" data, whilst one of my older 40 GB HDDs should hold the system (root, home, usr and swap on primary partitions). To that end I want to first copy the current system contents (using the 120 GB as buffer), repartition the 40 GB to my changed needs and then copy the system contents back. This was reported to work, so I don't think there's a problem in principle.

Alas, the problem:
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On the 120 GB HDD, I have created (among others) a 10 GB ext2 partition to serve as a buffer for my root contents, and a 20 GB ext2 partition for my home contents. I did so using the following command:
(respectively hda3)
That space should suffice easily: my root (still including usr at this point) is currently about 4 GB, and my /home is about 5 GB.
Now I try to copy the data like this (example for root partition):
It starts fine, but after a while I recognise among all the cp-output a message indicating that there is no more free space on the destination drive (don't know the correct syntax of the message in English, my system runs in German). However, there definately IS plenty of space left.

Question:
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What's happening there?
Is this an inode problem?
Any remedies?

Thanks in advance!
- furrySpider -

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Just an addition:
I'm running Slackware 10, the new Harddrive is a Samsung Spinpoint, and there are no journals in the concerned file systems. And, it copied a FAT32 partition nicely.

Alright, found my mistake.

On a different forum I was advised to try the command df -i, which will reveal the number of inodes for the partitions.
I still won't claim to fully understand the inode issues (something I have to change in the future), but obviously they dictate the possible number of files a partition may hold. And a difference of a couple million inodes between target and destination partitions seems to be a problem. ;-)

So, I reformatted the target partitions with
and it worked.

Near the end of the info page for the 'tar' command is an example of using tar to move an entire directory. All of the attributes are duplicated also.

$ cd sourcedir; tar -cf - . | (cd targetdir; tar -xf -)