From: unruh on

No.

You erase or move out everything that is currently in /others. It is now
an empty partition.

Now you copy
rsync -avx / /others
Now, go to /others/etc/fstab and edit it and change the line that looks
something like
/dev/hda1 / ext3 <whatever> 1 1
to
/dev/hda11 / ext3 <whatever> 1 1
and put a # at the start of the line which contains
/dev/hda11 /others ....

Now you edit the grub.conf file, or whatever debian uses to set up the
grub, and put in a new entry for booting from /dev/hda11 instead of
from /dev/hda1

(I hope I remember correctly that at present /others is on /dev/hda11)

Now you test your system to see if it boots from the new entry in the
menu list.

If it works, you can remove the old entry, edit the new grub and
reinstall it (I do not know grub as I use lilo, so you will have to get
someone else to correct my errors)



On 2010-02-26, Ant <ant(a)zimage.comANT> wrote:
> On 2/25/2010 8:22 PM PT, unruh typed:
>
>>>> If that does not by you enough room ( it should) transfer your / partion
>>>> to your current /others partition ( /dev/hda12)
>>>>
>>>> At present, I would move all the little bit of stuff in /other away
>>>> somewhere else, erase /others, copy the / partition to the /other, and
>>>> set up lilo/grub to point to /dev/hda12 as your boot partition.
>>>>
>>>> At present add menu entries to lilo/grub for /dev/hda12 keeping th
>>>> eones you already have, reboot, and choose the new ones, and make sure
>>>> everything works. If it does, remove the stuff in your current /
>>>> partition.
>>>
>>> So I can have Grub2 (not Lilo and legacy v1 since Debian gave me v2 a
>>> few months ago) boot to another partition (/dev/hda12)? I didn't know
>>> that. I thought MBR stuff needed to be in the first area or something.
>>> Note that this is an old machine with old IDE/ATA drives (e.g., 80 GB).
>>
>> Linux can boot to any partition, and any drive AFAIK.
>> MBR is something entirely different. The MBR is the very first sector on
>> the disk, which the bios can load into memory and run. It contains the
>> very first part of the bootloader. The program in the MBR then uses the
>> bios to download a set of sectors from the disk and jump to their start.
>>
>> The MBR is NOT part of any partition, It is a sector at the beginning of
>> the disk that no operating system makes a part of its own filesystem.
>
> Ah cool. So I would tell Grub2 (do I assume that's MBR?) to look in
> /others as well. I will have to figure out how to tell Grub2 to do that.
> Looking at /boot/grub/grub.cfg was very confusing and complex, but I did
> see its hda references. However, it had a warning note that said not to
> edit this file since it was autogenerated from /etc/grub.d and
> /etc/default/grub. I looked at those two places, and very confused what
> to edit if I want to point to another partition (/dev/hda12).
>
> Still another problem with this neat method/idea: How do I tell apt-get
> to install the newer Kernel version into /others instead of overwriting
> the 2.6.30 in /boot? It looks like installing linux-image-2.6-686
> package will overwrite my current running 2.6.30-2-686 package. Here is
> what apt-get said:
>
> # apt-get install linux-image-2.6-686
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> The following extra packages will be installed:
> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
> Suggested packages:
> linux-doc-2.6.32
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
> The following packages will be upgraded:
> linux-image-2.6-686
> 1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 126 not upgraded.
> Need to get 27.5MB of archives.
> After this operation, 78.7MB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
>
>
> Heh, this is getting a bit complex and messy! :/
From: unruh on
On 2010-02-26, unruh <unruh(a)wormhole.physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
>
> No.
>
> You erase or move out everything that is currently in /others. It is now
> an empty partition.
>
> Now you copy
> rsync -avx / /others
> Now, go to /others/etc/fstab and edit it and change the line that looks
> something like
> /dev/hda1 / ext3 <whatever> 1 1
> to
> /dev/hda11 / ext3 <whatever> 1 1

Oops it was hda12, not hda11, so change all hda11 to hda12

> and put a # at the start of the line which contains
> /dev/hda11 /others ....
>
> Now you edit the grub.conf file, or whatever debian uses to set up the
> grub, and put in a new entry for booting from /dev/hda11 instead of
> from /dev/hda1
>
> (I hope I remember correctly that at present /others is on /dev/hda11)
>
> Now you test your system to see if it boots from the new entry in the
> menu list.
>
> If it works, you can remove the old entry, edit the new grub and
> reinstall it (I do not know grub as I use lilo, so you will have to get
> someone else to correct my errors)
>
>
>
> On 2010-02-26, Ant <ant(a)zimage.comANT> wrote:
>> On 2/25/2010 8:22 PM PT, unruh typed:
>>
>>>>> If that does not by you enough room ( it should) transfer your / partion
>>>>> to your current /others partition ( /dev/hda12)
>>>>>
>>>>> At present, I would move all the little bit of stuff in /other away
>>>>> somewhere else, erase /others, copy the / partition to the /other, and
>>>>> set up lilo/grub to point to /dev/hda12 as your boot partition.
>>>>>
>>>>> At present add menu entries to lilo/grub for /dev/hda12 keeping th
>>>>> eones you already have, reboot, and choose the new ones, and make sure
>>>>> everything works. If it does, remove the stuff in your current /
>>>>> partition.
>>>>
>>>> So I can have Grub2 (not Lilo and legacy v1 since Debian gave me v2 a
>>>> few months ago) boot to another partition (/dev/hda12)? I didn't know
>>>> that. I thought MBR stuff needed to be in the first area or something.
>>>> Note that this is an old machine with old IDE/ATA drives (e.g., 80 GB).
>>>
>>> Linux can boot to any partition, and any drive AFAIK.
>>> MBR is something entirely different. The MBR is the very first sector on
>>> the disk, which the bios can load into memory and run. It contains the
>>> very first part of the bootloader. The program in the MBR then uses the
>>> bios to download a set of sectors from the disk and jump to their start.
>>>
>>> The MBR is NOT part of any partition, It is a sector at the beginning of
>>> the disk that no operating system makes a part of its own filesystem.
>>
>> Ah cool. So I would tell Grub2 (do I assume that's MBR?) to look in
>> /others as well. I will have to figure out how to tell Grub2 to do that.
>> Looking at /boot/grub/grub.cfg was very confusing and complex, but I did
>> see its hda references. However, it had a warning note that said not to
>> edit this file since it was autogenerated from /etc/grub.d and
>> /etc/default/grub. I looked at those two places, and very confused what
>> to edit if I want to point to another partition (/dev/hda12).
>>
>> Still another problem with this neat method/idea: How do I tell apt-get
>> to install the newer Kernel version into /others instead of overwriting
>> the 2.6.30 in /boot? It looks like installing linux-image-2.6-686
>> package will overwrite my current running 2.6.30-2-686 package. Here is
>> what apt-get said:
>>
>> # apt-get install linux-image-2.6-686
>> Reading package lists... Done
>> Building dependency tree
>> Reading state information... Done
>> The following extra packages will be installed:
>> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
>> Suggested packages:
>> linux-doc-2.6.32
>> The following NEW packages will be installed:
>> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
>> The following packages will be upgraded:
>> linux-image-2.6-686
>> 1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 126 not upgraded.
>> Need to get 27.5MB of archives.
>> After this operation, 78.7MB of additional disk space will be used.
>> Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
>>
>>
>> Heh, this is getting a bit complex and messy! :/
From: Pascal Hambourg on
Hello,

Ant a �crit :
>
> I already removed all the old Kernels long ago.

Not completely, according to the contents of /lib :

> 212K /lib/modules/2.6.26-2-486
> 12M /lib/modules/2.6.30-1-686
> 217K /lib/modules/2.6.26-2-686
> 2.4M /lib/modules/2.6.26-1-686
> 1.2M /lib/modules/2.6.22-1-k7

I guess you could free a few useful megabytes. Also you could remove the
old initramfs backup in /boot :

> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9363480 2010-01-22 08:57 initrd.img-2.6.30-2-686.bak
From: Pascal Hambourg on
Ant a �crit :
>
> It looks like installing linux-image-2.6-686
> package will overwrite my current running 2.6.30-2-686 package.

It won't. These are different packets anb they cannot overwrite each
other. It will just install the new 2.6.32 kernel.

> # apt-get install linux-image-2.6-686
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> The following extra packages will be installed:
> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
> Suggested packages:
> linux-doc-2.6.32
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
> libc6-i686 linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686
> The following packages will be upgraded:
> linux-image-2.6-686
> 1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 126 not upgraded.

See : 0 to remove.

> Need to get 27.5MB of archives.
> After this operation, 78.7MB of additional disk space will be used.

Note that you will need some extra space for the initramfs.
From: Ant on
On 2/26/2010 8:00 AM PT, Doug Freyburger typed:

> If you don't want to reinstall yet the next thing to try is to become
> progessively more dead by making matters worse and worse. Look for
> large files in the / partition not under /boot. Move them to other
> locations and replace them with symbolic links. Find old files to
> delete without backups. The more you do this the uglier your system
> will be, but it is a Bandaid(TM) approach that will work for a while.
> Maybe.

Thanks. Yeah, I think I am going to have to plan for a full install from
scratch to wipe this clean since this Debian install is very old and
getting too messy.
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