Ran out of space on the main drive, adding an additional drive

[yhelothar]

I've been trying to figure out how to add an additional drive to the main disk. Since all of the binaries point to the main drive, even when I have partitioned the new disk and mounted it, I don't know how to get new programs to install on the new disk.

Coming from windows, the linux file system is quite alien to me. I tried reading a few guides on how it works, but I'm still quite lost on how to deal with multiple disks. Several sites says to edit etc/fstab, but doesn't give explicit instructions on how to do so. And even if you do edit it, how do you decide what gets installed on which drive?

Is there a good guide for a windows user to transition to the linux file system?

 

[postmortemIA]

this should help, recommended practice is to move the home directory on different partition anyway
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving
will move your home directory, however that is not where binaries are

 

[lxskllr]

I agree with keeping /home on a different partition. It makes management, and reinstalling easier. Here's an Arch guide for the file system. Most of the distros will be similar, but some have minor differences and practices, and some others are using experimental layouts, but this should be a good general guide.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_filesystem_hierarchy#Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

As an aside, Arch has good documentation in general. You can't use it word for word on other distros, but with a little translation, you can use it on anything. Their docs are clearly written, and thorough.

 

[yhelothar]

What if you have a lot of apps that you want to install that exceed the size of your original drive(even after you've moved your home folder) and you want to expand the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard folders across multiple drives? Also you want to choose which installation goes to which drive so you could manage the disk usage. How would you do that with Linux?

 

[SecurityTheatre]

What if you have a lot of apps that you want to install that exceed the size of your original drive(even after you've moved your home folder) and you want to expand the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard folders across multiple drives? Also you want to choose which installation goes to which drive so you could manage the disk usage. How would you do that with Linux?

Normally in UNIX, you have a single monolithic "file system" under which multiple "volumes" are mounted. There is no concept of c:\ d:\ etc.

So in a system, you might have

hda1 /
hda2 /home
hda3 /usr
hda4 /swap


However, you can do "spanned" volumes. I haven't done it, personally, but here is someone who has:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ne-mount-point-to-span-several-drives-537836/

That might do it for you.

 

[mv2devnull]

What do you have now? Partitioning, LVM, filesystems, etc?

 

[yhelothar]

Thanks. The spanned drives seems like it'd work.

I'm just using a single drive with one partition now. I have a second drive that I'm deciding what to do with now.

 

[mv2devnull]

The different distro's at different times have had different default for partitioning. The current default for Redhat (I think) is two partitions: one small for /boot filesystem and one large for LVM physical volume. The / is on LVM logical volume.

Those, who don't use LVM, can use GParted to resize partitions (and filesystems within). LVM has its own management tools.

I would recommend against spanned volumes. Any drive fails -> whole volume fails. If I had a logical volume (LV) on small disk, I would add a large disk to the same volume group (VG) and then tell LVM to relocate the LV to the larger physical volume. Then I could remove the original physical volume (partition) from the VG, and naturally expand the LV (and filesystem within). No spanning.

You don't want to do things "online". You want to boot a "live" distro, which does not depend on the HDD. (I usually use the Redhat install kernel+initrd in "rescue" mode for that.) Now your disk filesystems are "offline" and safer to resize/relocate.

No matter what you will do, having a backup is a very good thing.