partition madness

[pedro687]

i made the foolish mistake of not giving my /var directory it's own partition. i would like to correct this since the box will be used as a mail server.

i have /archive mounted on/dev/hda9 (and /var mounted under root partition). what i would like to do is get rid of /archive and move /var to the /dev/hda9 parition. probably very simple but i don't really understand what's involved here.

how do i do this? what happens to the data that was on /var after a move it? does it stay on the / partition or does it move, or is it destroyed? do i have to clean out (remove, and backup data?) before doing this? i really appreciate any help you can give me. pedro.

[bdg1983]

I believe it's just the matter of copying (not moving) the contents of /var to /dev/hda9 (moving off whatever was in /archive first), change the entry in /etc/fstab from '/dev/hda9 /archive' to '/dev/hda9 /var' etc. and then reboot.

If all looks ok, then delete the original /var

That's probably about it though you can most likely figure out what certain precautions you may need to take before proceeding.