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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:35 am 
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Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:05 pm
Posts: 252
Location: GA, USA
I installed a new front/backend system in 2008. At the time the wisdom was "no root partition ever needs more than 5GB" so I set mine that size. I've managed to keep my system the last 4 years without ever completely wiping out and starting over, which is a record. However, that decision to keep my / at 5GB is catching up to me.

I have 3 hard drives, two of which are partitioned XFS and used as part of the MythTV default Storage Group. The third drive has 5 GB root, 3.2 GB swap and the rest of the 1TB (~930GB) in a JFS partition that is my main /myth partition.

I thought I would just fire up GParted and shrink something to make space for an expanded /, but the XFS and JFS partitions can't be shrunk.

Since /usr is 2.2GB of my 5GB drive, I tried creating a usr directory on the /myth partition and rsync'ing /usr to /myth/usr. I added
Code:
/myth/usr /usr none bind 0 0
to my fstab after the line that mounts /myth and I renamed the local /usr to /usr1.

Obviously something went wrong because now the system starts booting and then shuts itself off. I used a LiveCD to rename /usr1 back to /usr, but I'm still stuck with my 92% full 5G / partition, of which 2.2G is /usr.

Since I can't shrink the other partitions, my last hope to get a little relief is to shrink or erase the swap partition and then give its space to /. That should buy me a year or two at the rate / has grown since I put this system together in 2008. I've seen before that modern distros don't really need swap, and in fact my swap is almost always at 0% used, but I can't find confirmation.

I've read all the full drive threads and used a lot of du commands to try narrowing down the culprit. I'm usually able to get rid of space warnings by clearing the pacman cache, removing unwanted Myth and XBMC themes, and moving the ~/.xbmc/userdata directory to the /myth drive and symlinking to it. I don't have a runaway log problem. I wish I did because that would be easy to fix. /usr is big but when I start drilling down I stop finding obvious culprits.

Is there anything else I can do short of buying a new hard drive and copying the data there to larger partitions? Thanks.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 1:17 am 
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Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:05 pm
Posts: 252
Location: GA, USA
Update, ~1 hour later. I was able to resize the swap to 2.2G and give that extra gig to /. Everything seemed to go well and I've dropped back to 76% full. Since I know that won't last, I'd still like to know if anyone has a suggestion to get out of this mess without losing data or backing up 1.5+TB's of recordings and starting from scratch. In the meantime I'll keep working to see if I can reduce the amount of space / is using.

EDIT: What I tried in the first post actually worked! I guess renaming /usr to /usr1 didn't work, but when I renamed it back to /usr and forgot to remove the /fstab entry, it booted just fine with the bind command shown above. Unfortunately I didn't figure it out until I did a rm -rf on the /myth/usr directory and the system stopped working again. I fired up the Live CD again, removed the fstab entry, and the system started up just fine. I might try it all again in this order:

1) rsync /usr to /myth/usr
2) add bind line to /fstab
3) reboot
4) if everything works properly, go to /mnt and create a mount point. mount /dev/sdc1 [mount point] and delete everything in the /usr directory while leaving /usr in place
5) cross fingers and reboot again.

I'm guessing it will work fine. It's still a kludge, but I don't how else to get out of this corner. It's way past my bedtime so I'm done fooling for the night.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:13 pm 
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location: California
If you do a "df -h", how much unused capacity do you have available? What is the size of the other 2 drives? Perhaps you can:

1. Delete a bunch of old recordings you don't care enough, thus freeing up a bunch of storage.
2. Copy all of the recordings that are on the drive containing the root partition to the other 2 drives.
3. Now you can delete and recreate the JFS partition at a smaller size.

Keep in mind that mythtv will automatically find a recording if you move it to a different drive within a storage group. This makes life easier when you need to reorganize your storage...

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 8:08 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:05 pm
Posts: 252
Location: GA, USA
All 3 of my recording drives are at 90% or more capacity. The one on the disk with / is 900+GB and the others are 250GB and 500GB. That means there's not enough storage space to do that with the existing disks. I can hook up an eSATA or USB external drive, copy all the files and then recreate the partition, but that's a lot of time copying and recopying I'm not currently willing to spend. I will probably resort to something like that when the current partition gets too small for me again. I'll have to see if I have an old, lower-capacity HD that I can CloneZilla-copy the / and swap partitions to. Then I could go a long time without running out of space. Thanks for the suggestion.

To answer your questions, this is what df -h shows after stealing 1GB from the swap:

Code:
Filesystem                                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                                                     10M     0   10M   0% /dev
run                                                      10M  232K  9.8M   3% /run
cachedir                                                4.0M  4.0K  4.0M   1% /lib/splash/cache
/dev/disk/by-uuid/d10281bf-c338-4842-b7b4-7e2d4e62bf6d  5.8G  4.2G  1.4G  76% /
shm                                                     1.7G     0  1.7G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdc3                                               924G  837G   87G  91% /myth
/dev/sda1                                               466G  433G   34G  93% /myth2
/dev/sdb1                                               233G  206G   28G  89% /myth3

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 9:49 pm 
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
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Location: California
One more thing to consider is moving your root partition to the 250GB drive. It would significantly reduce the volume to data you need to copy and restore...

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 11:33 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
I agree with mark
However I ran into a problem when I tried to boot from my backup of my install. When the system and grub uses the UUID to name partitions it's a hard link to the drive it was set up on. So in my case I thought I was booting to the backup of the root drive when infact I was booting to the root drive since grub was pointing to a specific UUID partition. Here is a little more info https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pe ... ng_methods

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