merging partitions question

[Canon <seti sympatico ca>]

Hello,

I have a bit of a conundrum. I installed RH9 a while back and created 
appropriate partitions only to find that one of them is growing low on space 
so I was thinking of merging two partitions.  Here's my present setup:

hdb1 = /boot
hdb2 = /
hdb3 = swap
hdb5 = /home
hdb6 = /home/data
hdb7 = /usr
hdb8 = /var

The partitions I need to merge are hdb7 and hdb2 since my /usr partition is 
filling up rapidly and I have only 1% usage of my "/" partition.

Technically if I move /usr to my / and change the fstab values would that 
work? or are there some sort of associations to worry about (still kinda new 
to linux). BTW, how would I move all of /usr to /? 
(login as root in failsafe and "mv -R /usr / "?)

Last - if this is the right way of doing it, how could I then physically merge 
the partition with another so as to recuperate the space left void in hdb7?

Thanks for the help
//Canon