One filesystem spanning multiple hard drives...

[gzf at gbrmail.msd.ray.com (Jerry Feldman {75562})]

"Kevin M. Gleason" <kgleason at ma.ultranet.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a way to have Linux look at my
> 500m and 275m hard drives as though it was one drive of approx 775m and
> allocate its own partitions?
Since everyone else has chimed in i'll put in my $0.02.
What you want is generally called stripe sets, but I would allocate your
drives somewhat as follows:
Assume 500m is /dev/sda and 275m is /dev/sdb
I would place /boot and swap on /dev/sdb. Any space left on /dev/sdb can be
allocated as a spare. I would place / on /dev/sda. Lets say that /boot is
50MB, swap is 130MB. This leaves 90MB. If your user home directories will
live comfortably in 90MB, then you could make the rest of the drive as
/home. 

My Alpha has an internal 524MB drive, which has been used to hold Red Hat
5.2. After or during installation, you can use symbolic links to move
specific directories around. If you have arranged your system with /home as
the 90MB space, and you only use about 20MB, and want to move the X11R6
directory over, then simply create an X11R6 directory unser /home,
recursively copy its contents over, then delete the /X11R6 tree and create a
symlink to /home/X11R6. 

I used to do stuff like this on my workstation at Digital when each release
of Digital Unix outgrew the partitions. While this is a real pain sometimes,
*nixes don't really care what file system things are on (with a few
exceptions). The /boot file system needs to be big enough to hold a couple
of kernels and .map files, and does not need to be a separate partition
except in cases where you have more than 1024 cylinders. 


-- 
Jerry Feldman (HP On-Site Consultant) http://gbrweb.msd.ray.com/~gzf/
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