Changing root partitions... is it possible?

[jesseb]

Hello everybody! I have a Gentoo 2005.0 installation on an 8 GB partition, and had a SuSE installation on a 45 GB partition. I decided to dump SuSE, and switch to a total Gentoo system. Now I thought that since I have all that free space, I would try to see if I could create a reiserfs partition in the space, copy all the files from my current Gentoo root partition to the new partition, change a few things, and boot from the new partition. So I did the following:

mkreiserfs /dev/hda3
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/new_root
cp -a -v /* /mnt/new_root
nano /mnt/new_root/etc/fstab

I edited fstab on the new partition to have /dev/hda3 as root. I also added the new system to my grub.conf, and then rebooted to see what would happen. All went well until it got to the mounting root partition stage, in which a message said something about missing /dev/console, among other files. So I rebooted back into my old Gentoo install, and checked out /dev/hda3. Now everything somehow dissapeared except /sys, /proc, and /tmp! Does anybody know of a method that I can move everything from my old partition to the new one and get a workable system? If I could somehow resize my old root partition to fill up all the space, that would be another way, but as far as I know you can't change the start point of a partition without causing major problems. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[sdousley]

i found that this was happening for me too. The solution i found was to manually unmount the partition. Not quite sure why it did it, but it worked for me

Think it'ssomething to do with the way linux works with mounts etc

[smindinvern]

do this:

cp -rRf /{root,usr,bin,lib,etc,home,opt,sbin,var} /mnt/new_root
mkdir /mnt/new_root
MAKEDEV /mnt/new_root/dev

then edit /mnt/new_root/etc/fstab to make everything line up, and change /boot/grub/grub.conf to make sure that root=/dev/hdxX points to the new root partition, and if your /boot isn't a seperate partition you need to copy that to the new partition and make sure that grub will boot to that drive.

[smindinvern]

Think it'ssomething to do with the way linux works with mounts etc

it means that the /dev/console node doesn't exist, why I told him to do makedev

[jesseb]

Thanks everyone for your help. Actually, I figured it out by doing a copy this way:

 (cd /; tar cvf - .) | (cd /mnt/new_root; tar xf -)

Tar complained about some of the time stamps, but copied everything perfectly. I didn't even have to makedev to get the new system running. From there it was just a matter of booting from the Gentoo livecd, deleting the old partition and the new partition, creating a new partition with the same starting point as the one that SuSE used to have, and the ending point at the end of the hard drive. Then resize_reiserfs /dev/hda3, and boot into a very nice full-hard drive Gentoo installation!