Partitions and disk space

[Steven J. Norton]

Thanks, Geert. I may explore the commercial option if that is not too
expensive. Your solution sounds like it would indeed solve my problem,
except that the other ~18 Gb is not really free. The rest of the disk is
taken up with a Mac OS 9 partition (since I must boot with BootX) and an OS
X partition (not really needed, but I had real problems with my first
attempts to install YDL and the only way I could get around it was to
format/partition the disk initially with the OS X disk utility rather than
OS 9's drive setup). But maybe I can do without OS X now......

Thanks again,

  Steve

on 10/4/2004 1:03 PM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> There are two options I see:
> 1. some time ago, there was an anouncement on this list for a commercial
> linux partioning tool, that was capable of resizing partitions without
> data loss. You could search the archives to see if it suits you.
> 
> 2. Do a "partition dance" (although this is not non-destructive!): if I
> read the number correctly, you have only 62Gb of your 80Gb HD in use.
> The partition dance would take the following steps:
> 
> * make an additional temporary partition in the free part of your HD,
> large enough to hold all data currently stored in /usr. In your case,
> that would be, larger than 1.6Gb.
> 
> * make a filesystem on the new partition, and mount it (eg in
> /mnt/your-mounted-temp-partition)
> 
> * as root, use cp -ax /usr /mnt/your-mounted-temp-partition
> to copy over all of /usr to your temporary partition, preserving all
> file attributes
> 
> * IMPORTANT: modify your /etc/fstab to use the temporary partition as
> /usr next time you boot
> 
> * reboot
> 
> * if the boot process doesn't complain, you can delete the old usr
> partition, and in this free space create a new /var  and /usr partition.
> If you want your final /usr partition to be 10Gb, create the new /var
> partition 34Gb. If this is not enough, you will first have to move your
> old var partition into the temporary space just as you did with the usr
> partition. Then you can delete the old var partition also in this step,
> and have 45Gb to divide into a new /var and /usr partition.
> 
> * make a filesystem on the new partitions, and mount them (eg in
> /mnt/your-mounted-new-var-partition and /mnt/your-mounted-new-usr-partition)
> 
> * as root, use cp -ax /var /mnt/your-mounted-new-var-partition and
> cp -ax /usr /mnt/your-mounted-new-usr-partition
> to copy over all of /var to your new var partition and usr to the new
> usr partition, preserving all file attributes
> 
> * IMPORTANT: modify your /etc/fstab to use the new var partition as
> /var, and the new usr partition as /usr next time you boot
> 
> * reboot
> 
> * if all is well, you can delete the temporary /usr and /var partitions.
> 
> As I said, not non-destructive, but it works. I have done this more than
> once already. The safest thing in any case is to make a backup of all
> sensitive data before doing this.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> 
> Geert
> 
> Steven J. Norton wrote:
>> Hello, all --
>> 
>> Here are some questions I've been meaning to ask for a while now: if you
>> check out the disk space report from LogWatch on my YDL web server
>> (reprinted below), you'll note that my /usr and /home partitions are quite
>> large and only sparsely used, while the /var partition (home to the content
>> files of my web server) is much smaller -- and already 17% full and
>> climbing. I had accepted the partition scheme suggested by the YDL installer
>> when this was set up.
>> 
>> So here goes:
>> 1) Is there a non-destructive way to change the size of existing partitions
>> (i.e. can I retrieve some space from, say, /home and give it to /var)?
>> 
>> 2) If so, which partitions that currently have extra space can be safely
>> made smaller? Since I'm not using this as my main computer, I am assuming
>> that /home does not need to be this big as there will not be too many user
>> files. What about /usr -- if I'm not installing a bunch of productivity
>> software, will this ever grow much?
>> 
>> [This is on an old beige G3 with a fresh 80 Gb hard drive and running YDL
>> 3.01, by the way.]
>> 
>> I know that I can tell Apache to look elsewhere on the disk for content
>> files, but I'd much rather keep everything inside /var/www/ for both
>> security and sanity reasons. Of course, this isn't really a problem yet, but
>> I've only just really started using the server and I want to head off
>> problems if I can. Any advice appreciated!
>> 
>>   -- Steve
>> 
>> ------------------ Disk Space --------------------
>> 
>> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/hda14            496M  120M  350M  26% /
>> /dev/hda12             16G  146M   15G   1% /home
>> none                  187M     0  187M   0% /dev/shm
>> /dev/hda10             44G  1.6G   39G   4% /usr
>> /dev/hda13           1008M  155M  802M  17% /var