Dan Track wrote:
Hi I've got /var in the root filesystem. What I would like to do is move it to a new separate partition. I've created the partition but when I mount /var onto it /var is empty. If I umount it I can see all the directories again e.g /var/log. Can someone please tell me why this is happening and find a way round this?
This is the expected result. When you create a new partition and make a new empty file system in it, the file system is empty of files. When you mount this onto /var, an then look at /var, the OS is showing you what's in your new empty file system you've just created and mounted. The original /var contents is "under" the /var mount and will only be accessible when you unmount the empty file system you mounted on /var. In order to have all the original contents in the newly created partition and file system, you will have to do something like this: 1) Boot into Linux Rescue from FC media. This is because you will need to copy files in /var, which may not be readable or removable if a process is using them. 2) Mount the new partition/file system somewhere like varnew 3) Copy var into varnew, remove var (to recover the disk space) taking care to keep permissions the same. Something like # cd to / on the original root disk (not the running live / ) # cd var; tar cf - . | (cd varnew; tar xvf - ) 4) Unmount varnew and mount it as var. Make sure this is set in etc/fstab so that the system will have the new partition/ file system as /var when we boot. 4) Reboot Good luck, Khoa Ton
