Just one confirmation first.
You said you have "Red Hat 5".
Do you mean the current Red Hat _Enterprise_ Linux 5 or the ancient RedHat Linux 5.x (released back in 1997-1998 and thoroughly obsolete now)?
If it's the latter, back up your data and reinstall with a newer version. Seriously.
Your fdisk -l output is obviously missing a few lines at the beginning that would tell the total capacity of the disk.
Nevertheless, I can see two things:
1.) Your /usr is physically located between / and /var on your disk, so you would have to manipulate both /usr and /var to make use of any space you could gain by reducing /. That may complicate things, unless...
2.) Your partial fdisk -l output shows:
> /dev/sda4 5699 8833 5 Extended
> /dev/sda5 5699 7003 83 Linux
From this, I can see that cylinders 7004 - 8833 are within the extended partition but not part of /dev/sda5 (/var). The important question is, do you have /dev/sda6 (or any further partitions on this disk) or not?
If /dev/sda5 is the last partition on this disk, cyls 7004-8833 are currently unallocated. As they are located immediately after /var, adding them to /var would be very simple.
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Procedure for extending /dev/sda5, assuming that it's the last allocated partition on the disk and has some unallocated space after it:
Take a backup first.
Start fdisk with "fdisk /dev/sda", delete partition /dev/sda5 and re-create it so that the starting cylinder stays the same (5699 in your case) but the ending cylinder value is larger. If there are no partitions beyond /dev/sda5, you can use the the last cylinder of the disk (8833) as the ending cylinder, which should in your case more than double the current capacity of your /var.
Remember that the fdisk only writes the new partition table to disk when you use the "w" command. If you think you may have made a mistake, just use the "q" command instead to exit without making any actual changes. Write to disk only after triple checking you've got it right.
When writing the changes to the disk, fdisk will detect that the disk still has mounted filesystems on it, and the changes will be effective only after a reboot. The fdisk command won't force you to reboot, but you cannot proceed with the expansion until you do it.
(If there are neither mounted filesystems nor active swap partitions on a disk, the kernel can detect the new partition layout immediately. But as /dev/sda2 contains your root filesystem, that is not possible in this case.)
After a reboot, the partition has been extended and the kernel is made aware of the new size, but the filesystem still reflects the old size.
In RHEL5, that is fixed with with a simple command: "resize2fs /dev/sda5". It will automatically detect that the filesystem is mounted and smaller than the partition it's in. It will perform an on-line extension, and then the expanded capacity of /var will be available for use.
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MK
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