Moving /var to new partition

burnpile · 12-10-2003, 12:21 PM

I've searched for this already but didn't get the specific answer I'm looking for, so here goes a new post.
My daughter used to dual boot XP/Slack 9 on her laptop. She decided to do away with the dual boot and run slack 9.1 alone (she likes kopete better than trillian was her reason heh). At the end of her hard disk, I made a 1 gig partition to hold some data from XP she wanted to keep. Slack is up and running, and the win partition is now reiserfs. What I'd like to do is move /var to this partition. Is this possible to do on the /var folder? I'm asking because it's so dynamic, she has an ATI video chip and it spits out messages to the x log pretty frequently.

Here's my partition scheme

Code:

                         cfdisk 2.12
                                                                     
                    Disk Drive: /dev/hda
              Size: 30005821440 bytes, 30.0 GB
    Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 3648
                                                                     
   Name     Flags   Part Typ        FS Type       [Label]    Size (MB
)-----------------------------------------------------------
   hda1              Primary           Linux swap                  509.97
   hda3     Boot   Primary           Linux ext2                   98.7
   hda4              Primary           Linux ReiserFS             6999.7
   hda5              Logical            Linux ReiserFS            10001.9
   hda6              Logical            Linux ReiserFS            11342.6
   hda7              Logical            Linux ReiserFS             1052.8

hda1 = swap
hda3 = /boot
hda4 = /
hda5 = /usr/local
hda6 = /home
hda7 = unmounted <future /var>

any ideas/suggestions/help is appreciated

Technoslave · 12-10-2003, 12:24 PM

You can give it a try.

What I'd do is load the boot CD and then chroot the main partitions ( not really needed, but it's easier than typing /mnt/sysimage all the time ).

From there, I'd do a cp -R from /var to /newvar, then mv /var /oldvar;mv /newvar /var, then change the fstab entry to point to the partition of the new /var. Reboot.

Hopefully that's a good enough outline for you on how to do it.

burnpile · 12-10-2003, 12:33 PM

Good idea. I never thought of using a boot cd. I'm trying it now