can more storage space be added to an existing /home directory?

i've been running mandriva for a while and would like to expand my /home
directory. can this be done by simply adding a drive and mounting it under
/home? or will that conflict with the existing drive's /home?

how does this work in mandriva?

or would the way to do this be to add a larger drive and copy the existing
/home data over to it?

iow, can the directory /home be assigned across multiple partitions/drives
without raiding? or is it a one shot assignment?

i suppose what i'm wondering is if the mount assignment is a virtual thing
which can point to multiple physical devices/partitions.

sorry to run on. just not sure how to make my questions clear when i'm in
a state of confusion.

thanks,
BabaG

Mounting it over an existing /home would just impose the contents of the mounted drive over the existing home. As soon as you unmounted the new partition the existing home's contents would be back.

Yes this is how to do it. Make sure you've logged out of all sessions and are only logged in as root when you do it.

RAID doesn't really do this - it mirrors the directories across multiple physical disks for either redundancy or in RAID0's case for speed. It can't really be used for combining the storage capacity of 2 disks since its based on mirroring.

Logical Volume Management is how you combine space from multiple disks or partitions into a single greater partition. But to convert your /home partition into an lvm partition would require you to format it. However you may want to try it (after backing up the original data first) - I think the Mandrake partition thing supports it.

Not directly but if you setup an LVM partition that spans across multiple devices/partitions and mount it then you have effectively done that.

thanks for the thorough answers tkedwards. let's see if i have it right.

sounds like lvm will allow me to combine disk space from various sources
into a single partition. the sources can be on different disks. i'm gathering
that the sources would be partitions as well. iow, i couldn't do something
like add a directory to an lvm scheme unless it was its own partition. in
adding space to the lvm scheme i would first have to re-define the lvm
partition to include the original partition as well as the new partition, then
format it. this necessitates backing up all data from the pre-existing
partitions which would be later restored onto the new lvm partition.

there is no way to simply add a drive and say 'add this new space to
such-and-such directory.'

is this pretty much how it works?

thanks again,
BabaG

Yeah. The way it works is say you had 2 20GB disks in your system and you wanted to use LVM for the whole thing you'd have:
/dev/hda1 /boot (100MB)
and then have the rest (of both hda and hdb) as one big LVM partition.
Then on that LVM partition you would create say:
one ext3 root (/) partition of 5GB, one swap of 1GB, ext3 /home of 25GB and leave the rest of the space free (9GB). Then maybe 6months down the track you realise that that root partition isn't big enough to hold the latest Mandriva or Ubuntu or whatever so you use LVM to resize it to 7GB. It takes that extra 2GB out of the free space on your LVM partition and most importantly doesn't require you to reformat your root partition, nor does it affect any of the other partitions (swap and home) in any way.

Anyway have a read of the LVM howto - it explains it better than I can: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO

With LVM there is but otherwise no, AFAIK.

thanks again. very helpful. and thanks for the link too.

BabaG