I will explain it my way , got a bit confused with your explination .. You have one hard drive lets say 10 GIG. 4 Gig for NT , 2 GIG for var .. and what ever
If you don't want any data from the NT drive , do the following Unmout the NT partition , so when you type in " mount " at the bash , it should not be in there ( The NT partition) now you can mke2fs or format that partition . so now you have an epty , unmouted partition . Lets say you want to use that partition as /var. Make a directory called var2 , and copy all of /var into var2 ... so you are copying the /var contents into a folder var2. Now unmount the /var partition , since you did not have a /var partition , but a /var folder , you can delete it afterwards. now mount /var onto the empty partition , so when you are done , and type " mount " at the prompt again , it shoul show you that /dev/hdax is now mounted as /var . Now just copy the var2 contents into the /var partition . Reboot if you want to check that everything comes up fine Regards G.Brits Linux Systems Engineer Technology Concepts Tel +27 11 803 2169 Fax +27 11 803 2189 -----Original Message----- From: David Bishop [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 02 March 2001 01:21 To: debian-isp@lists.debian.org Subject: transfering amongst partitions So, I trying to convert a machine that has been dual-booting NT and Debian for awhile, mainly because I just noticed that I haven't booted into NT in over two months :-) I want to reclaim that lost disk space that is currently an NTFS partition, and that's where I'm stuck. The current layout of the drive is hda1=ntfs, hda2=/, hda5=swap, and hda6=/home. hda1 is 4 gigs, and hda2 and 6 are two gigs each. Now, I assume it would be easiest to re-fdisk/format hda1 to be ext2, then copy all of hda2 over, then hda6 as well, delete everything but hda1, and refdisk to make a four-gig hda2, and recreate the swap. Sounds easy, right? Well, therein lies the troubles. First, I don't know of a safe way to transfer all of those files. I've tried to use tar in the past, but had permision issues (things ended up being owned by root). I could use dd, but that's a block-by-block transfer, right? So the partitions would have to be the same size? cp has the same problems as tar, and how does copying device files work? I thought I read that would screw stuff up. Oh, and how do I boot up afterwards? I forgot to mention that there is no floppy disk available, so I can't just boot off of a rescue floppy and rerun lilo when everything is schootched around. So, I am undoubtably making a mountain out of a molehill, and I just ask that you guys not laugh too loudly. Laughing up your sleeve is perfectly acceptable, though :-) TIA and HAND, D.A.Bishop P.S. Of course this box is running some web services so it can't be down for longer than about 1/2 hour. Just making things easy on me B-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
