Issue with table size impact on replication

[jmmirabal]

We are running Solaris 8 on two hosts.  On the master the table size reached a max level
of 4.2GB.  An "alter table searchArticle max_rows=1000000000;"  was applied on the master
successfully.  This in turn broke replication due to the command execution wirg a error 28
which means that the file system exceeded capacity.  The table description is: 
CREATE TABLE `searchArticle` (
  `id` varchar(23) NOT NULL default '',
  `enhancedFlag` tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '0',
  `headline1` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `headline2` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `storyText` text,
  `notes` text,
  `keyWords` text,
  `byline` varchar(101) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`,`enhancedFlag`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `headline1` (`headline1`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `headline2` (`headline2`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `storyText` (`storyText`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `notes` (`notes`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `keyWords` (`keyWords`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `byline` (`byline`)
) TYPE=MyISAM |

The table in the file is:
-rw-rw----   1 mysql    mysql    4294928212 Nov 23 22:30 searchArticle.MYD
-rw-rw----   1 mysql    mysql    2667123712 Nov 27 18:14 searchArticle.MYI
-rw-rw----   1 mysql    mysql       8778 Oct  3 16:36 searchArticle.frm

And the available space on /tmp
swap                 6634280    1264 6633016     1%    /tmp


The combined data and index is 6.9GB /tmp has only 6.6 GB

Is there a way around this. 

The only solution I can come up with is to drop the index unless I can get more space in
order to perform this alter table command to increase my table size.

Thanks in advance!