[Novalug] questions on re-assining /var and /tmp

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Wed Nov 25 22:45:56 EST 2009


On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:19:08PM -0500, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> 
> when I set this current harddisk up i made assignments of / /var and 
> /tmp to separate partitions. I gave them much to much room and I would 
> like to reassign /var /tmp to the / partition. Other than going through 
> with a reinstall of the system from a CD, is there a straightforward way 
> to reassign these?
> 

The basic idea is to edit /etc/fstab and "comment out" the two
lines corresponding to /var and /tmp.  Both these dir's already
exist in the (/) root file system.  So when you boot the next
time, the root filesystem will start to be used for /tmp and /var.

HOWEVER, while you probably do not need the data currently in /tmp,
you will certainly need the data in /var.  So you will have to copy
it over to the real /var directory.  This will not be able to be
done on a booted system.

So shutdown and reboot from some live cd.  Make some dirs to mount
the HD partitions, perhaps /r, /v, and /t for root, var and tmp.
Mount the file systems -- var and tmp on /v and /t could be mounted
read-only.

Copy all under /v to /r/var and if you want the current /tmp data,
all under /t to /r/tmp.

This would be a good time to edit the fstab file, it is now under
/r/etc/fstab.  Creating a copy before editing would not be a bad
idea.

Do a sync or three to flush any cached data out to /r, and unmount
the three file systems.

Shutdown and reboot the real system.

I'm sure a lively discussion could be started as to what cmd(s)
to use to effect the filesystem copy.  ;)

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon@jgcomp.com
 JG Computing
 12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
 Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)



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