Moving /usr to a different partition

[foxcub]

Well, the subject pretty much speaks for itself, but here are a few more details. I used to run Mandrake 8.2, and tried Gentoo just to see what it is - gave it a tiny partition (maybe 4G) not planning to use it longer than a day or two. After installing it I immediately fell in love with it (my best regards/compliments to the developers), and never touched Mandrake again. The problem is that I didn't switch immediately and have now a lot of stuff on the tiny partition. I want to reformat my Mandrake's / partition (while keeping /home) and use it for Gentoo's /usr. I was wondering if I can do it in the following way: reformat it, mount it as something like /mnt/usr, then say mv /usr/* /mnt/usr (or whatever the appropriate command is), and then change fstab to mount that partition as /usr. Will everything be safe this way? Will any permissions, symbolic links, whatever else I can't think of be screwed up? And if that's the case, what's the best way to do what I wanna do?

Thanks a lot.

Dmitriy

[rommel]

look at the articles section ....there are a couple writtin by daniel robbins about moving /home /var and /usr, there are others that will probably help fill in any other gaps too. i moved /home like a week ago using that howto , very simple and went smoothly.

[foxcub]

Thanks a lot. I appreciate the help.

Dmitriy

[Beders]

I used the mentioned article to move /var to a new partition.

However, after doing that I wasn't able to emerge anything anymore.
I got permission denied errors and similar when unpacking stuff.

Obviously emerge can't deal with symbolic links properly. I had to
change the PORTAGE_TMPDIR to the absolute path of the new /var/tmp directory
in /etc/make.conf: