RE: System stops because /var/log not found after moving to new partition

bj
2005-02-26T17:45:04Z

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-newbie-owner@vger.kernel.org
[mailto:linux-newbie-owner@vger.kernel.org]On Behalf Of Ray Olszewski
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2005 8:44 AM
To: linux-newbie@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: System stops because /var/log not found after moving to new
partition

At 09:16 PM 2/26/2005 +0545, bj wrote:
>Hi !
>
>I have a Red Hat 8.0 on a intel 2.4 machine with 512 MB .
>
>I have kernel 2.4.20-30.8-legacy & 2.4.20-30.8-legacy bigmem.
>
>I used to have all my directories /var , /tmp , /usr , /home under one
>partition / .
>
>Thanks to everybody , now I was able to re-partition my drive into extended
>drives (drives < 4) and move my /var , /tmp into hda5 & ,my /usr , /home
>into /hda6 .

For future reference, it is a lot easier to associate partitions with a
single top-level directory than with multiple ones, as you have chosen to
to. For example, if I assign a partition to /home, I can just mount it
there in fstab, without needing to use the symlink indirection you use:

/dev/hda4 /home ext2 defaults 0
2

>Bu I am facing one problem.
>
>When I boot my system logger does not see the /var/log which has been moved
>to the new location .
>
>The system just hangs .

At what point does it "just" hang? What is the last message on screen? And
how long do you wait ... are you sure it is a true hang and not a problem
that times out after, say, 3 minutes?

>When I boot in single mode by passing an argument to my kernel that does
>show in the dmesg in the new location .
>
>In addtion when I run a command like 'clear ' it shows that it could not
>find the library to run it .

Where does your system have libncurses.so.5 (the "missing" library)? On my
systems,it is always in /lib, a hard place to lose.

>I have mounted hda5 & hda6 in my fstab .
>
>I did create soft link for my new var , new tmp & new usr to the the /var
,
>/tmp , /usr as ffs :-
>
>ln -s /mnt/hda5/var /var
>ln -s /mnt/hda5/tmp /tmp
>
>ln -s /mnt/hda6/usr /usr

This should all work fine, assuming the symlinks are created immediately
after the partitiions are mounted during the init process.

>I moved the old files using the ff commands:-
>
>cd source directory
>
>cp -ax * /mnt/usr5/var
>
>or
>
>cd /src/dir ; tar cf - . | (cd /dest/dir && tar xvf - )
>
>
>
>
>But still it does not work .
>
>Please find attached the dmesg & library error and fstab.

I assume the dmesg example is from the single-user boot, not the one that
"just hangs". So it doesn't tell us what is up with the hang. Next time,
please also include the output of ...

ls -l /
df

... and if you are reporting the results of two different boot/init
sequences (single user and multiuser) please be VERY VERY clear about which
attempt each result goes with.

>Please advice.
>
>Thank you for your help in advance.
>
>bj
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Hi!

Thank you for the prompt reply .

Since I have Red Hat 8 , I had downloaded and installed (configure;make;make
install) the latest stable qt-x11-free-3.3.4 from the /home directory which
I moved .

My understanding was that wherever I downloaded the library will be still be
installed under /lib .

My /lib is where it was from the beginning . I have not moved it .

The system hangs means , the boot process shows "Starting system logger "
then just stays there because it could not find the new /var that has been
moved to /mnt/hda5/var .

The boot process also gives messages such as :-

/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit:line 596:/var/run/utmp : no such file or directory

/etc/rc.d/sysinit:line 744: /var/log/dmesg:no such file or directory

touch:creating 'var/lock/subsys/keytable" no such file

Hence , it does not find the moved var .

Please find attached the df & ls -l listings :-

ls

total 196
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 13 10:14 applications
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Feb 8 10:01 backup
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 5 04:15 bin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 25 10:49 boot
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 118784 Feb 26 23:00 dev
drwxr-xr-x 70 root root 8192 Feb 26 23:01 etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 21 2001 initrd
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Feb 4 22:49 lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jun 26 2004 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 27 2002 misc
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Feb 26 08:44 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 23 1999 opt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 26 22:32 other
dr-xr-xr-x 33 root root 0 Feb 26 18:00 proc
drwxr-x--- 31 root root 4096 Feb 25 10:52 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Feb 4 23:04 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 5 04:10 tftpboot

df

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 4134932 410416 3514468 11% /
/dev/hda5 10056868 284348 9261656 3% /mnt/hda5
/dev/hda6 19765692 4879948 13881684 27% /mnt/hda6
none 256972 0 256972 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 1025840 535856 489984 53% /mnt/usb

Thanks,
bj