[ILUG] Creating partitions...

[Kenn Humborg]

...
> 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

This doesn't explain the behaviour you saw, but it is work mentioning
for anyone else doing this kind of thing:

   You should drop to single-user mode for _all_ of the above, not just
   the last step.  /var is a live filesystem, so could have changed
   between the tar and the umount.

Later,
Kenn