[LUG] partitions, mount and /usr/share

[Neil Williams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was doing a lot of testing a while ago that involved having >8 different 
distros on the one machine, that led to quite a lot of partitions on the 
original 20Gb and a second 60Gb discs. Now that I've settled on Debian, I'm 
quietly wiping old partitions and moving system folders across to make space 
on the root partition:

neil@xxxxxxxx:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5             4.7G  2.6G  1.9G  59% /
tmpfs                  63M     0   63M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb9              20G  3.7G   15G  20% /mnt/home
/dev/hdb5             7.5G  169M  6.9G   3% /opt
/dev/hdb7             6.9G  1.1G  5.5G  16% /var

Of that 2.6G on /, about 1Gb is in /usr/share.

I don't see that /usr/share would be a problem moving, but I just want to 
check the syntax. Previously, I've only ever moved top level folders.

mke2fs /dev/whatever
edit /etc/fstab
mv /var /oldvar
mount /dev/whatever
cp -r /oldvar/* /var
rm -rf /oldvar

(Just done that tonight.)

When I edit /etc/fstab to mount, say, /dev/hdb6 as /usr/share, I'm presuming 
that GNU/Linux is sensible enough to work out that /usr is on / (/dev/hda5) 
and /usr/share is on /dev/hdb6. Directories in /usr/share will then be 
created in the top level folder of /dev/hdb6. All that's happened with /var/ 
is that /var/lost+found/ has appeared, as expected.

So fstab would need:
/dev/hdb6       /usr/share      auto    defaults        0       2
?

Then cp /usr/share across and rm -rf /usr/oldshare 

mke2fs /dev/hdb6
edit /etc/fstab
mv /usr/share /usr/oldshare
mount /dev/hdb6
cp -r /usr/oldshare/* /usr/share
rm -rf /usr/oldshare

The advantage is that the system can keep on running whereas if I try and 
merge partitions to re-create the original single space on /dev/hdb, it's all 
going to get very involved with parted and reboots.

(It's late, I just wanted confirmation so that I can do this tomorrow, maybe.)

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
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