[ILUG] Creating partitions...

[Philip Reynolds]

OK, situation here is that we've got an IBM zSeries, basically it comes
with it's own "ServerGuide" which gives you base installs for a load of
stuff, and contains the drivers you need for about 6-7 different operating
systems to work on this machine. 
We were choosing Redhat 6.1 install and I actually thought it was pretty
funky until...

We were working through the install process and we find we can ONLY create
a single partition. Now we've been instructed to create 5 extra:
/var, /home, /opt, /tmp and /usr

It's an 18 gig disk, give the thing two gigs of swap and create a 2 gig
/ partition.
Run through the install, install GNOME Workstation with FTP server setup
and Samba (exactly what we were told) ... everything seemed fine and dandy.
My plan was to move over /usr, /home, /var, /tmp and /opt AFTER the install.

Now after the install is complete, I applied a patch to the kernel, 2.2.16-3
and created 5 new partitions with cfdisk in the free space that was left.
/dev/sda{6-10}

Anyways after the creation and the kernel patch had been applied, I fixed
lilo.conf and rebooted. Partitions were written to disk and the boot process
had picked up the devices /dev/sda{6-10}
Now on each of the partitions I ran the following command:

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdaX

mkdir /mnt/{var,home,tmp,opt,usr}
and mounted each of the partitions accordingly as I had set out from the
start.
Now, how to do the rest? Well my idea (which I couldn't see problems with)
was to tar off the data on the fly from /usr to /mnt/usr, from /var to /mnt/var
etc. etc.
e.g.:
cd /usr; tar lcvf - . | (cd /mnt/usr; tar xpvf - )

Now next thing to do was to move across the folder, I added an entry into
/etc/fstab for each of the devices

/dev/sda6 /opt ext2 defaults 1 1
...

Now, while in single user mode, I did the following:

cd /
mv usr usr.old
umount /mnt/usr
mount /usr

It mounted user perfectly, while leaving the old /usr and it's data in /usr.old
I did the exact same for the rest of the partitions, leaving each one seemingly
working fine.

Problem?
when I rebooted, the system hung. This happened AFTER the boot process,
GDM starting basically HUNG, monitor went blank, starting flicking green.
Keyboard wasn't responding.
Now I think I did everything right, can anyone see a flaw with what I did?
Init scripts started everything else fine, however GDM just hung.

Ideas welcome!
Phil.