Moving /sys to another partition without reinstalling

Question

To cut a long tedious story short, I have two partitions on an SSD. The much larger one has Ubuntu 10.04, the small one has 12.04. In the past few weeks I've finally been moving away from using 10.04 to 12.04 (I was tardy doing this because on this particular laptop there were a number of problems with 12.04 but I've now worked around these)

At this point I have 12.04 working the way I want, but it's been painful and I'd rather not have to go through it again. However, the 12.04 partition is too small (only about 500MB left and I'm bound to eat into this in the future if the past is a guide) So I've already moved my home directory to the 10.04 partition but I'd like to move /sys too (as this is has by far the largest footprint of what's left)

I understand that /sys is a mount point so I'm wondering if simply making it a link to a directory on the bigger partition is going to work (at all or work reliably)? Do I need to worry about disk mount order?

Answer 1

Rather than moving directories around you could simply resize the partitions. If you boot from a live CD/USB there is a program called GParted. It is fairly easy to use and I have resized many partitions without any problems.

One issue I have had when doing more involved rearranging of partitions is the breaking of GRUB but this can be fixed by running Boot-Repair.

Answer 2

I'd like to move /sys

Don't bother

It's SysFS, a virtual file system. The kernel presents information to the userspace by this. It's not taking up space on your disk, it's not configurable.

Sysfs is a virtual file system provided by Linux. Sysfs exports information about devices and drivers from the kernel device model to user space, and is also used for configuration.

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sysfs is an in-memory filesystem that was originally based on ramfs.

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Sysfs is used by several utilities to access information about hardware and its driver (kernel modules) such as udev or HAL. Scripts have been written to access information previously obtained via procfs, and some scripts configure device drivers and devices via their attributes.