On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Sri Krishna kitchi.srikrishna@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I'm doing a clean install of Arch on a new computer, and during the install I'd already set aside 2GiB for the /var partition.

Except I forgot to add it to fstab before I exited chroot, and booted into Arch and installed a DE etc. Now two days later I realize that Arch has already created a /var directory on the / partition. How do I migrate /var into the partition I'd originally created for it?

Is it as simple as adding a line to fstab and rebooting?

Obviously, no. Check pacman -Ql. You'll probably end up booting from cd, moving all data that now resides in /var to your var partition, change fstab and see if that boots.

cheers! mar77i

I'd say copy everything in /var to /mnt.

cp -a /var/* /mnt

or

cp -dpR /var/* /mnt

That way you don't lose anything if there's a power cut at an inconvenient time, and you can change ftstab, reboot, and then check everything's working before you hose your original /var (which if you do it this way you really only need to do if (a) "/" is full and (b) original /var is big enough to be worth the trouble reclaiming the space (but remember to go into rescue mode and unmount your new /var first, if you do this!)

Jeff

Sent from my iPhone

On 4 Sep 2014, at 12:36, Damjan Georgievski gdamjan@gmail.com wrote:

make a filesystem on the extra partition (mkfs.ext4) enter resuce or emergency mode (systemctl rescue) so that the least services run

mount the new partition to /mnt move everything from /var to /mnt unmount /mnt edit the /etc/fstab

reboot

...

On 4 September 2014 13:13, Sri Krishna kitchi.srikrishna@gmail.com wrote: Hi,

I'm doing a clean install of Arch on a new computer, and during the install I'd already set aside 2GiB for the /var partition.

Except I forgot to add it to fstab before I exited chroot, and booted into Arch and installed a DE etc. Now two days later I realize that Arch has already created a /var directory on the / partition. How do I migrate /var into the partition I'd originally created for it?

Is it as simple as adding a line to fstab and rebooting?

Thanks, Krishna

-- damjan

So it seems like the most feasible approach is to boot from CD/USB into rescue mode, mount var into /mnt, copy the contents of the old var folder into the new one, add the new one into fstab and reboot.

I guess I should also delete the old var folder. I'll try that in the next few days and report back on how it went! Hopefully it won't cause my system to catch fire and explode. :)

Thanks, Krishna

On 4 September 2014 17:16, Martti Kühne mysatyre@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Damjan Georgievski gdamjan@gmail.com wrote:

...

make a filesystem on the extra partition (mkfs.ext4) enter resuce or emergency mode (systemctl rescue) so that the least

services run

...

mount the new partition to /mnt move everything from /var to /mnt unmount /mnt edit the /etc/fstab

reboot

-1. Did you try this yourself? Can you think of any errors that your approach might cause?

See, if you have open files in /var, they might get recreated on shutdown. Which leaves the mount point nonempty and probably breaks your boot process.

cheers! mar77i