I am facing this problem at work - my original partition configuration seemed to be right at the time but is now no longer appropriate and we are about to run out of room.  Partition Magic would solve the problem under normal circumstances but unfortunately, we have "home" on a drive on its own and "var" on another drive with other partitions and not much room.  What we are storing in var is growing fast and it will have to be moved.  One could probably set up a symlink but that's a bit kludgy and prone to failure.

As luck would have it, following exchange has just occurred on another list and I thought I would publish it here.

Here's the problem as stated -

"I've got a machine that has everything on one partition, which was OK at the time, but is causing some pain now. I've got a free partition and I want to move /usr from the root partition to the newly formatted partition *without* kill anything that currently works."

Here are some solutions -

cp -L -preserve=all -r /usr /mnt/hda6

"but some links weren't being created. I'm currently using midnight commander to do this[1], but I want to know the right way to get it done with cp.

midnight commander did preserve, so it is done correctly, but I feel dirty doing it this way. What is the "right" way to do this with cp?"

OR

     pax -rwvtpe /usr /mnt/hda6

Drop the 'v' if you don't want to see what it's doing.

If you don't have pax, the next tool to try is tar(1):

    tar -cf- /usr | ( cd /mnt/hda6 ; tar -xvf- )

Again, drop the 'v' as above.

OR

cd /usr
find . | cpio -pm /mnt/hda6

One should change to single user mode before doing this and of course, log on as root.