Adding a harddrive

[shoel]

I have Mandrake 8.2 installed on a 1.8 gig hdd. Currently i have 45MB free on hdb1 (mounted as root) and 674MB on hdb6 (mounted /home). If i installed a third hdd and set the mount point to /, would the system act as if i just had more space on hdb1? ie: would i continue to be able to install programs without having to tell it to use the third hard drive? i thought that i read somewhere that linux would do this but i cant seem to find the reading again.

 

[poorboy]

No it doesn't work exactly like that...

The *easy* way is to plug in drive 3, and boot to single user mode (or type init 1), and after formatting the drive as ext3/reiser/whatever copy /usr to it, then set the system to mount /usr off that drive.

eg, in /etc/fstab, if the drive is hdc1 add:
/dev/hdc1 /usr reiserfs notail 0 0

I'm suggesting this way because it avoids having to migrate / to another disk which is real confusing the first time or 2, and because most of the stuff is in /usr anyway. Can you post the output from `df -h`, just so I can understand your current setup?

<i>It's all the same with the lights off</i>

 

[shoel]

Results of df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 992M 897M 45M 96% /
none 125M 0 124M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb6 713M 62M 651M 9% /home

 

[poorboy]

Thanks for that. Looks like tacking the drive on under /usr is the easiest option... This will give you room to install more software if that's what you want the space for (btw, if you want to know where all the space has gone, try "du -sh /*").

<i>It's all the same with the lights off</i>

 

[shoel]

Thx for the information.
One more question why does it jump from hdb1 to hdb6 like that?

 

[poorboy]

Um, I dunno. Probably because the installer likes using extended partitions? You could run cfdisk or fdisk and have a look at the partition table to find out.

<i>It's all the same with the lights off</i>