Is it okay to mount multiple partitions in a single folder?

I get a warning when trying to mount, which suggests I add the "noempty" argument while mounting, but I'm not sure whether this could cause nasty effects. The partitions are both NTFS, containing lots of my pictures. I don't want to have to mount to two folders like /mnt/pictures/partition1 and /mnt/pictures/partition2, instead I want to mount to /mnt/pictures.

Many thanks in advance.

(I posted this in the hardware forum because we're dealing with hard drives, I thought it was the most appropriate at the time.)

Google for "unionfs"

Thanks for your suggestion, but after a bit of research, it seems that unionfs is generally only used in livecds.

I've done considerable research into using LVM, but at the moment I can't find a solution whereby, if one disk crashes, the rest of the disks will continue (allbeit, with data loss). Apparently I can't use raid, because the size of the partitions that would make up the LVM are different sizes.

I would recommend you do more research. I just mounted 2 NTFS partitions with unionfs in the same location. Works fine for me. I've also used it to combine split images in the past.

Yes indeed! I've just got it working!

I'll write a small blog entry and post the link up here in the next few days for those that want to know how to do it.

mjmwired: Thank you so VERY much I'm sorry for dismissing your first post.

No problem, glad you got it to work.

I looked at unionfs a while back - IIRC there was an issue of same named files (file/directory structure) on multiple directories. For me this was a stopper at the time. Also one had to be careful with creating new files in the correct place - not an issue if directories are "sane" I guess.