> I have an 850 meg Maxtor HD and a 200 meg Western Digital hard
> drive. I have been using the 200 meg HD for my Linux partition, but
> this has not been nearly enough for my *needs*. I wish to use the 850
> meg HD for Linux, but I have only regular IDE channels. I have not
> been able to use this hard drive for Linux before while using the
> On-Track Manager-esque software I'm using, so I would have to disable
> that and only use the 504 meg, but that would be okay.
The reason you have to use OnTrack is because your BIOS doesn't support
the larger disk. I think that with Linux, you'll be able to use the
whole disk. To check this, boot Linux and run fdisk on the disk and see
what it tells you about the disk geometry / size.
Quote:> Here's the question: how can I use the part of the 850 meg and the 200
> meg as ONE partition? I've heard this can be done, and I am currently
> reading the "Multiple disks mini-howto,"
This is to some extent a mis-named HOWTO. What is does is suggest ways
of using multiple disks with Linux as to sensible partition layout e.g.
if you have a 40M disk and a 100M disk, put / on the 40M disk and /usr
on the 100M etc. - in these days of disk space at about $100 / GB this
information is becoming obsolete. To do what you want, you need the MD
driver, which makes multiple physical partitions into one logical
filesystem. That said, you might be better off following the
recommendations in the HOWTO you are reading. The MD driver is really to
let people build arbitrarily large filesystems, and your two disks
tgether don't make a very big file system. I'd suggest that you might be
better off using your 200M disk for /, /usr and swap and then mount the
other disk as /usr/local (or whatever).
Hope this helps somewhat . . .
--
Kindest regards,
Niall O Broin
Ground Systems Engineering Department Ph./Fax +49 6151 90 3619/2179
European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany