[CentOS] Urgent help on replacing /var

[John R Pierce]

On 08/03/12 3:24 AM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
> In a moment of epic stupidity, having ran out of space on the root
> partition of a server due to /var chewing up the space, I added a
> separate drive for the purpose of mounting it as /var
>
> To do so, I mounted the new drive as /var2, cp -R (in hindsight should
> had rsync to preserve attributes), deleted the original /var to free
> up space, edited fstab and rebooted... unsurprisingly to a fubar'd
> server.
>
> The thing is it still boots, I can get into single user mode but a
> full init get stuck at starting the syslogger. What is the best way to
> rescue the server now from my own stupidity and keeping all the
> existing configuration and data?

if you had any database servers like postgresql or mysql, and their data 
files were in the default locations under /var, your databases are 
undoubtably corrupted, unless you stopped the DB server(s) before doing 
this copy.

-- 
john r pierce                            N 37, W 122
santa cruz ca                         mid-left coast