When I installed my current Linux system, I created a root partition of only 10GB (mainly because I already had another distribution installed that I wanted to keep as a backup). While this is enough for my purposes, Audacity regularly filled up the whole partition with data in \/var\/tmp\/audacity-daria. That is not only annoying (because Audacity will stop working), but also potentially dangerous for the stability of the whole system.
\nNow I could have just knocked off the other distribution and resized the root partition, but it occured to me that it would be a better way to just use its existing partition and move \/var to it.<\/p>\n
I found various different tutorials on how to do this around the web, so to make confusion complete I decided to add my own. \ud83d\ude00
\nI am currently running Ubuntu 13.10 (64-Bit), but this should work on any other recent Ubuntu\/Debian release, and probably on most other current distributions, too.
\nI should also mention that I assume you have some basic knowledge about the file system structure on a linux system, that you know what a terminal is and you’re not afraid to use it. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
First of all, we need to format the partition we are going to move \/var to. I did this with the graphical tool gparted. Some people use reiserfs, I simply stuck with ext4. In my case, the partition’s name is \/dev\/sda4. At this point, also create a new directory \/var2 by entering sudo mkdir \/var2<\/em>. This is going to be our temporary mount point. Now we can put our new partition into the fstab. Find out its UUID with the command blkid<\/em>, that will return something like this: Copy the value for \/dev\/sda4 (or whatever your partition is) without the quotation marks, and open the fstab with a text editor of your choice. I simply use nano: sudo nano \/etc\/fstab<\/em><\/p>\n Add the line for your new partition, so that it looks something like this: To mount everything according to new fstab, enter sudo mount -a<\/em>. If no error occurs, you can also check if it has been correctly mounted with mount<\/em> or gparted.<\/p>\n Now comes the tricky part. Enter sudo init 1<\/em>, your system will drop down into single user mode, leaving you with only a root prompt. Now we need to copy everything from the „old“ \/var to the new one. Enter sudo cp -a \/var\/* \/var2\/<\/em> – this may take a while. If you’re curious about the progress, add the option -v<\/em>. You can check the correct execution by typing ls \/var and ls \/var2, which should look mostly the same.<\/p>\n If you want to empty the old \/var, you need to do this now – you won’t be able to do it from within the system later on! But unless you urgently need space on the root partition, I wouldn’t touch anything more that necessary, just to be safe and able to go back, just in case.<\/p>\n Now, go back to the fstab, and just change the line for \/var2 into \/var. Again, you might want to check whether that worked by entering mount -a<\/em> and mount<\/em>.<\/p>\n Congratulations, we’re done! Type reboot<\/em> and your system should come up like it has always been that way.<\/p>\n If you found any mistakes in my little tutorial, please<\/strong> drop me an e-mail!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I installed my current Linux system, I created a root partition of only 10GB (mainly because I already had another distribution installed that I wanted to keep as a backup). While this is enough for my purposes, Audacity regularly … Weiterlesen
\nBefore you edit your \/etc\/fstab file, make a backup of it! I am serious; if you do ANYTHING wrong, your whole system will be unable to boot!!! To do this, move to the directory and copy it:
\ncd \/etc<\/em>
\nsudo cp fstab fstab_backup<\/em><\/p>\n
\n\/dev\/sda1: UUID=\"e9325f37-4394-409f-bd9a-cb473ad0379f\" TYPE=\"ext4\"
\n\/dev\/sda2: UUID=\"75c07cfd-99ab-4a9f-a25c-d6db771c3565\" TYPE=\"swap\"
\n\/dev\/sda3: UUID=\"306b4fea-31c5-4eae-b631-c89374c28c12\" TYPE=\"ext4\"
\n\/dev\/sda4: UUID=\"20b0eecf-e80e-4d37-abe6-d2a2bb20078d\" TYPE=\"ext4\"
\n\/dev\/zram0: UUID=\"78caa6fc-d44e-4826-8e60-d0fc07e660cc\" TYPE=\"swap\"
\n\/dev\/zram1: UUID=\"323ad229-b8c4-44c5-8e56-006ca1fcaa9a\" TYPE=\"swap\"<\/code><\/p>\n
\nUUID=20b0eecf-e80e-4d37-abe6-d2a2bb20078d \/var2 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ext4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 defaults\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2<\/code>
\n(If you are curious what the other options mean, you might want to check the manpage for fstab.)<\/p>\n