Partitions

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Kyle,
That's easy. You want to do it in steps. 
1. create a directory on the /home partition, probably var. We'll make that 
assumption.
2. stop sendmail. (Actually shutdown to single user mode). 
3. copy the contents of /var to /home/var
4. umount /var
5. rmdir /var
6. ln -s /home/var /var # creates a symlink to your new /var
7. Restart sendmail (return to multi-user mode).
This leaves /dev/sda7. You can't resize partitions while you are using 
them. There is a version of Partition Magic for Linux that comes with 
Mandrake. You could possibly mount /dev/sda7 on /tmp or /usr/tmp, or you 
can make it an additional swap partition. Another similar approach is to 
mode the contents of /home to the /dev/sda5. Create a directory on sda5 
/usr/users. Copy the contents of /home to /usr/users. Delete the contents 
of /home. copy the contents of /var to /home. unmount /var and /home and 
mount /dev/sda6 /var
rmdir /home. ln -s /usr/users /home. Now you are using the entire sda6 as 
/var.
The reason you must stop sendmail while you do this is that sendmail is 
constantly receiving email to /var/spool/mail/xxxx and processing outgoing 
email in /var/spool/mqueue. You probably need to stop other processes that 
may use /var. Remember, logging goes to /var/log. You also have utmp and 
wtmp.

kyle at breezy.com wrote:
> I need to repartition my hard drive to combine sda7 with sda6.  I'm not
> sure how to do this.  Can it be done so Linux won't loss the path to
> /var?  Do I need to stop sendmail before I repartition?
> 
> Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda8               257343     67957    176095  28% /
> /dev/sda1                15856      4126     10901  27% /boot
> /dev/sda6              1756214     65758   1599693   4% /home
> /dev/sda5              1756214    474396   1191055  28% /usr
> /dev/sda7               257343    212267     31785  87% /var
> 
> Thank for your help.
> 
> Kyle Plummer
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-- 
--
Gerald Feldman <gaf at mediaone.net>
Boston Computer Solutions and Consulting
ICQ#156300



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