Resize or new partition for /var

why?

Thought /var wouldnt need more than 5G of space, so I foolishly created partition of only 5G and set /var to it. You know when you got new ssd with only 256G space, you try to act cool and think you can optimize but the thing is I am too lazy to optimize everytime 😅 😅 I checked my old hard disk the HDD and found out, /var was given 21G space and it was 15G filled already… Then my adrenaline rush of need to resize came strong and I am changing this state while writting this blog 😅 , if something goes wrong, I would be needing bootable pendrive 😅 😅

/var

/var is a standard subdirectory of the root directory in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems that contains files to which the system writes data during the course of its operation. - source http://www.linfo.org/var.html

Lets resize

Steps

// list available partitions
$ df -h 

Now lets delete the increase the partition, we will use fdisk to pseudo-delete the partition without writing it to disk then increase the partition size and write it to the disk.

$ sudo fdisk /dev/nvme0n1

// press `p` to select partition, `d` to delete it and `n` to create new partition with new size

Oh NOOOOOOOO moment

Partition I am tring to remove is /nvme0n1p6 and /nvm0n1p9 has the free space I am trying to extend to, Since sector Ending of p6 partition was not adjacent to sector begining of p9 partition, it does not allow to resize partition p6 to grow more than 5G space 😑

Fallback

I moved every thing of /var to new partition and rewrite /etc/fstab

// mount the partition to /mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0np19 /mnt

// copy every thing to /mnt => new partition p9
$ cp -apx /var/* /mnt

// check uuid of partition
$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

//  modify /etc/fstab
$ sudo leafpad /etc/fstab

Here is screenshot of my modified /etc/fstab

lets reboot and see if it works, if it does not work, I will have to uncomment uuid of previous partition on fstab with live usb boot 😅 😅

$ sudo reboot

voila!! It works and smooth

Next

I have given root / only 10G and my previous the HDD had 50G of space and 21G was filled, So it needs change some modification too. I will write about it in new post