makeworld FAILURE on 5.4-STABLE

[Donald J. O'Neill]

On Tuesday 16 May 2006 05:30, Kyrre Nygard wrote:
> >Is /home on a slice of its own. Mine is, for the reason that if I
> > have to blow off the system and reinstall, I can safely do that, as
> > long as I don't make any changes to /home, just remount it as
> > /home. You can do this with sysinstall, very easlily.
> >
> >Send the output from 'df', I can tell from that.
> >
> >Don
>
> Hello!
>
> Actually, my /home is under /usr ... uh oh huh?
> No can do then?
>
> Thanks for the tip of having /home as a seperate slice though,
> I'll treasure it for the rest of my days!
>
> Peace,
> Kyrre

Not as you have it now. However, I read a possible solution that I think 
might work, to you from David Stanford. I think it will work, it just 
needs a couple of suggestions to flesh it out a bit.

I'll requote it here:
How large is your /var slice? If it's large enough to fit /home (or at 
least the files you'd like to save), maybe try booting into single-user 
mode, mount /usr and /var, wipe out /var, copy the files from /usr/home 
to /var, and just remember to document what slice /var was. Then you 
could just reinstall the base system around it using a 6.1-RELEASE CD, 
no?

Just a shot in the dark...
===============

Not a bad shot in the dark, I think it will work if you do it this way:
1) Follow what David said above,  be sure to document what slice /var 
is. You're going to need that information when you reinstall with the 
6.1-RELEASE disc.

2) boot up the release disc. Use the standard install method. The first 
thing you come to is "fdisk" partitioning. The only thing you're going 
to do here is make an existing partition bootable, don't change 
anything else, don't make any new partitions, don't delete any. Just 
make the one partition bootable, then go on to the next step and 
install the boot manager.

3) BSDlabel is the next step. Since you didn't change any partitions on 
your disc, the existing slices should come up. You can remove and 
recreate all of them except the one you had for /var. You're going to 
mount that one as /home. At this point, you can create your other 
slices and mount points. Make sure that the slice you now have as /home 
is not going have 'newfs' run on it, all the others need to have it 
done, but not /home. Then go on with the installation.

Until you go through the disk label step, you haven't changed anything. 
Once you get through that step, you're committed, and what will be, 
will be. So, if you need any clarification, ask for it. Just remember, 
if you make a mistake, it's unpleasant and you'll be kicking yourself 
in the ass, but it's not the end of the world. 

Don