Hi,

I've put together a home server, so far it's ready hardware wise. Now I would like to install Ubuntu on it.

The hardware is as follows:

P4-2.6Ghz CPU 800FSB
2GB PC2700 RAM
4 x 40GB hard drives
GeForce FX5200 128MB video card
CDRW IDE drive

I took the floppy drive out. Then installed an ATA133 Dual channel PCI IDE controller.
IDE 1 on the motherboard has 2 hard drives and IDE 1 on the PCI controller the other 2 hard drives. IDE 2 on the motherboard is controlling the CDRW drive. I'll be using the Ubuntu Desktop 6.06LTS CD for installation. Basically, during the partitioning step, I would like to do the following:

/ = about 19GB
/swap = 512MB
/home = 140GB

I know how to do this in W1nd0ws, but would like to learn how to do it in Linux. Plus I want the stability from a Linux installation, instead. Any help is greatly appreciated? Links to howto's, personal experiences, all is welcomed.

Thanks.

Read the install docs,
run the installer,
follow the prompts....

You will use unix fdisk to partition your drives.
If you are not going to use a separate '/usr' partition I would recommend making '/' larger, or you may find yourself cramped down the road because _everything_ except your personal files will be put in '/'.

If I have to download the Alternate CD as my only option, then this is all a waste of time for me. I would like to just use the media I already have to do the install I want.

I went to Community Docs -> User Documentation -> Installation/LVMonRAID.

Who said you had to do that?

It's what I understood from the Install Docs at ubuntu.com.

Were you refering to a different installation document?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/LVMOnRaid

I see. You didn't say anywhere that you needed to use LVM and RAID.
If you do then I guess you are resigned to using the alternate install disk.

If you don't need RAID and LVM then just use the generic install docs:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall

I did get to the point where it shows all 4 separate drives: hda, hdb, hde, hdf. But I didn't see an option to tell it to combine more than one drive into one partition.

I could pick hda, create / and swap, but what about the rest of the drives? That's why I assumed I would need some kind of RAID tools during installation.

I'm at work at the moment. I'll go through the install again later on and see if maybe it recognizes the other drives and gives me an option on what to do with them.

Thanks for your help so far, tho.

I just went through the installation. At the partitioning step, I tried to assign /home to more than one drive. It didn't let me do that. The msg was one mount point assigned to more than one file system.

As it is right now:

/dev/hda1 = 30GB for /
/dev/hda2 = 512MB for /swap

/dev/hda3 = 8GB unused
/dev/hdb1 = 40GB unused
/dev/hde1 = 40GB unused
/dev/hdf1 = 40GB unused

So what would I need to do to combine the unused space into one and mount /home to it?

Thanks.

hrp2171:

I misread your original post.
If you want to combine the drives then indeed you need to use LVM and/or RAID.

LVM alone will do what you want, but it is non-trivial. RAID is not necessary unless you want some redundancy.

If you do not want to download the alternate install CD, I am fairly sure you can do a normal install, and just partition one disk for /home. You can then create the LVM setup after you have done the install.

Some reading if you want: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

Again, sorry for bunk advice earlier...

Thanks for helping me brainstorm, bulliver.

LVM was the key. I read the whole HOWTO and it demistified LVM for me.

This is what I did to create a spanned volume(MS term) covering several hard drives, then mounting it to /mnt.

I followed the LVM-HOWTO recipe for creating a volume group, etc on 3 hard drives. The difference is I have 4 drives to add. No biggy.

Given my current setup: /dev/hda3 /dev/hdb1 /dev/hde1 /dev/hdf1

Together they totalled aprox. 125GB of freespace.

Initialize all physical volumes(pv):
sudo pvcreate /dev/hda3
sudo pvcreate /dev/hdb1
sudo pvcreate /dev/hde1
sudo pvcreate /dev/hdf1

Create volume group(vg):
sudo vgcreate media /dev/evms/hda3 /dev/evms/hdb1 /dev/evms/hde1 /dev/evms/hdf1

Create logical volume(lv):
sudo lvcreate -L120G -nmedialv media

Format logical volume:
sudo mke2fs -j /dev/media/medialv

Mount and display available space:
sudo mount /dev/media/medialv /mnt
df

Output of df:
/dev/mapper/media-medialv
123854820 131228 117432136 1% /mnt

I now have aprox. 118GB to use.

Good work, glad you got it figured out!