On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 21:23 -0800, Shane Archer wrote: > At 05:04 PM 1/22/2005, you wrote: > > >If / is that large, what subdirectory is the biggest? Is /home or /opt > >in / and not on a separate partition? I would guess you have a LOT of > >downloaded stuff there that is bloating / unreasonably large. > > > >You can easily do a backup of the bulk of the stuff there to get it out > >of the way. Maybe put it off onto CDs to recover the space. Then after > >reducing the space required, the actual OS part of / should be about 3 - > >5 GB instead of the current 38GB. That could be moved to a new > >partition in its entirety and by making a small change in grub.conf and > >fstab you could boot to the new partiton for your system. > > > >Once the old / partition is not in use you would be free to do whatever > >was needed to resize it. > > This sounds like the most viable option yet, although I am not familiar > with the changes I'd have to make to fstab and grub.conf. > If you do not relocate / you would not need to modify grub.conf. I would rather relocate /home than try and relocate / if I were doing it. > Suppose that I just want to move something like /home or /var to another > partition. What changes would I need to make to fstab to make it happen? > 1. create the new partition and format 2. mount the new filesystem somewhere. (mount /dev/hdXY /mnt) 3. copy all the files from old to new cd /home cp -a <username> /mnt Now it gets tricky, because once the filesystem is mounted you cannot remove the old files from /home 4. logout, and log back in as root (you need to not have any files in the /home being used) 5. edit /etc/fstab and create a line to mount the new filesystem at the chosen location (/dev/hdXY /home ext3 defaults 1 2) or equivalent. 6. delete all the files in the original /home (rm -rf /home/username 7. mount the mew /home mount -a 8. verify it mounted properly mount 9. logout and log back in as your regular user and you are done. Note that if you have more than one user in /home, the cp command in step 3 and the rm command in step 6 will be required for each user. Also note that it will be a good idea to use the du command to confirm what size partition is required before you create it. (du -s /home) > The main reason for all of this is because I'd like to copy a 6.5GB > database from one of my web servers (hosted elsewhere) to my local machine > for testing, and I need to create space for it. If I could just move /var > to another partition, that would solve my problem (and hopefully I'd learn > more in the process). > Although moving /var would work, it is a system part of the tree and is usually much smaller than /home. It also would be tricky to move without breaking the system (moving is similar to the example above for /home, but it would require booting to rescue mode to do the part involving deleting of the old files and getting the new /var mounted) To see which part of the tree would give you the best benefit and the space requirements, a simple "du -s /*" will give you an output that will tell you which parts of the tree are heavy and which are not. On mine, /home has at least 4 times the space requirements of any other branch (in fact it is that much larger than all other branches combined). My default install I use (except for /home) fits easily within a 10GB partition and has lots of room to grow. For your 6+ GB database you may need up to 15 or 20GB to allow extra room but not likely more. I would suspect you will see similar results in space requirements and there are advantages to having /home in it's own partition. Mostly, if a new install is required, /home does not need to be formated and thus your customized data and directory structure does not get wiped out. > Thanks, > > Shane >
