Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote: > When I originally created my disk partitions, I figured 3GB would be > plenty for my root partition, and gave the rest of my 30GB disk over to > my /home partition. However, my root now shows 90% usage, and I'd like > to expand it -- or move my /usr area off onto another partition. Is this > possible, and if so, can somebody point me to a howto?
Resizing may be possible, but I think you need to have the filesystem unmounted to do that. So you'd have to boot up from another root fs, such as a rescue floppy or a Knoppix CD. Also, if your root fs is not followed by sectors that are not part of any partition, then I don't think you can do it. Something like LVM might be able to fake it. Moving /usr is probably less trouble. Here is how I would do it: 1. Reboot in single-user mode. This may not be essential, but it will save potential trouble when you get to step 6. 2. Create new partition for /usr; how big to make it depends on your needs. Use "du -sk /usr" to see how big your /usr directory is now; make the new partition bigger than that, since you don't want to have to go through all this again by running out of room. I would guess that 2 or 3 GB should be sufficient, depending how many packages you have installed. 3. Mount new partition. ~/new-usr or any other mount point will do. 4. Use "cp -a /usr/* ~/new-usr/" to copy everything from /usr to the new partition, retaining symlinks, privileges, ownerships, etc. If you're really paranoid, use md5sum to verify that the copied files all match their originals. 5. Modify /etc/fstab to mount the new partition as /usr. 6. mv /usr /old-usr; mkdir /usr; mount /usr 7. If all appears well, "telinit 2" to switch back to multi-user mode. 8. Once you are sure that all is well, you can delete /old-usr. Before actually following these instructions, wait a few hours to see if anyone posts a follow-up saying that I've forgotten something or that I'm just plain wrong. I've actually done this in the past, but not with /usr (I did move /usr/local, but that's much less critical). Craig
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