[CLUE-Tech] Red Hat 7.3 upgrade - /usr partition too small

[David Anselmi]

Paul Bille wrote:
> Ed > Partition Magic will do what you want. And FIPS might, also
> Ed > Re-partition with a better layout and re-install.
> 
> Hello Ed,
> 
> There are some advantages to doing a clean install but reconfiguring all
> the user accounts, mail, ftp, hosts . . . far out-weigh those
> advantages.  I'm hoping I can do an upgrade.

I think Ed is saying that you back up your files, repartition the drive 
and restore the files to the new partitions, not that you do a clean 
install of 7.3.

If you have free disk space for all the files in /usr, /var, and /home 
(assuming hda5, 7, and 8 are contiguous) you can easily move things 
around.  Here's how I would do it (for simplicity assume that the files 
in hda5-8 will fit in hdb1).

- format hdb1 as ext2 or whatever
- switch to single user
- if necessary, mount your various partitions, including hdb1 to /mnt 
(and remount / as read/write)
- copy your files to hdb1 like so:

cp -ax /usr /mnt ; cp -ax /var /mnt ; cp -ax /home /mnt

- umount /usr, /var, and /home (note that in single user mode none of 
those should need to be mounted)
- repartition hda5-8 to the sizes you need; sadly you have to 
reboot--reboot to single user mode
- mount your various partitions as above
- "cp -a /mnt/* /" will put everything back where it belongs
- switch to multi-user and you should be set

This is essentially what you'd do with Ed's method, depending how many 
partitions need resizing and whether you have to use CDs to hold 
everything.  I have done this several times and as long as your fstab 
and lilo.conf match the new partitioning (no problem here if you're just 
resizing) you'll be ok.

Dave