hard drive change with Linux reality check

I just got a hard drive big enough for my mp3 collection. Now I have to get it working.

My current set up has 2 IDE drives. One has root, /home and everything except /var, which is living on the second, smaller drive. My motherboard, being the limited beast that it is, will only let me plug 2 hard drives in at a time.

My thought is to make a tarball out of everything in /var, and to stick it somewhere on my root partition. Then, I will take out the ancient 4 gig drive, put in the new drive, boot Knoppix, play with fstab and fdisk, copy the tarball back over, unpack it, and boot my regularly scheduled Libranet system.

Is this completely insane? Or, just partially insane?

This would, unfortunately, leave my /home partition and root on the older, slower, smaller drive. I could copy stuff around with Knoppix after fdisking, edit fdisk, and get root on the new, faster drive, and add a partition just for mp3s on the new drive.

Again, it this showing more signs of insanity, or possibly a glimmer of a clue?

Thanks, gang.

ok i followed you up through the first paragraph...
yes, you can make a tarball, then unmount your /var partition and copy /var's contents back into /var (which will now be just an empty directory on your / partition)
edit your fstab and bang youve gotten rid of your old /var without even rebooting.
if youre worried about stuff that needs /var to be there while you do this, just do it in knoppix, as you say. no need for fdisk.

as to having your /home on the old drive still, not sure what you mean by that. everything will be on the old drive (the larger of your old drives, the one you are keeping, that has / on it) when you are done with this.

if you want to put your entire install on your new drive you can maybe do that too, with proper partitioning of your new disk and fstab editing.

Ok. Thanks, Scoofy. It is entirely possibly that I am making this much more complicated than it needs to be.

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It is entirely possibly that I am making this much more complicated than it needs to be.

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Don't feel bad, I do that a lot :D

Me, too, magnav0x. We will not talk about the time I wrote a 100+ line batch file in DOS to do something that was already in Novell DOS, but I just hadn't noticed.

Probably just doing a new install on the new drive, and copying /home over will be just fine. I've done simular things in the past, and if I hose it, there is always Knoppix <g>.