Hi,

I just finished updating my system from FC4 to FC6 and did so with a new hard drive. The old hard drive has been fdisk(ed) to delete the original partitions and repartitioned with one big partition

I have the majority of the new disk devoted to /video

In fstab I have for this one mount:

LABEL=/video /video ext3 defaults 1 2

Can I add the following:

/dev/sda1 /video ext3 defaults 1 2

Or will this new line be the only active line?

Is what I'm trying to do possible?

Thanks

Do you want to move the original video directory to a new hard drive/partition? If so, you have to mount the new partition to a temporary place (e.g. /mnt/tmp), copy all the necessary files from /video to /mnt/tmp, delete original /video, and remount the new video partition to /video. Make the relevant changes in /etc/fstab. It is quite straightforward, just be careful (and do backups!).

All the best,
Ott

I want one big directory

df -k Give this:
/dev/sdb5 269531896 63930056 191689552 26% /video

I want it to be something like:

/dev/sdb5 /dev/sda1 469531896 63930056 291689552 8% /video

Two devices making up one directory

Sounds like a job for Unionfs. URL will follow in my next reply since the forum software does not allow me to post links in my first post

Ok, here it is: http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html

can also use the Logical volume manager to group the disks into a volume group and create one large logical volume which you can mount as a filesystem and resize on the fly .
Included in some distro's notably suse , can be downloaded and added afterwards.
The only problem with this in your situation is the fact that you need to pull in the entire disk.

This is going to be a ongoing project with drives being added to /video as needed, or replacing a 150 gigger with a 750 GB drive.

With that is mind is one approach better than the other? I want this to be as painfree as possible after I get it setup. Not to worried about how difficult it is to setup this time through.

Thanks for the information and advice

I'm surprised you're not already using LVM with Fedora.
It'd be perfect for something like you're contemplating.

You still need to be able to grow the underlying filesystem - I've had issues with ext3 in the past. Others say it's fine.
Then there is the issue of performance as you get bigger. Might be worth also investing some time checking alternate filesystems - xfs, jfs, (ext4 ???) whatever.

If you are looking for ease of management and configuration then I would recommend using LVM.
You can add physical volumes to the volume group on the fly , extend the filesystem on the fly , even reduce it on the fly , (that is dangerous though , you can very easily destroy your data so backup before you do that)
If you wish to migrate to another PV then you can mirror to it and reduce the mirrors online .
One limitation that could still be in force on opensource lvm is that the largest physical volume that you specify at volume group creation time is the largest pv you will ever be able to add to that Volume group.
In this instance a create a new vg with larger disk , create lv , mount it as a temp name and copy data across.

or backup , recreate including larger disk and restore.
I have been using reiserfs with lvm on suse and I must say i have no hassles with dynamic filesystem resizing.

LVM is also what is used by default on most of the non open source ux distros out there , although the filesystem used on them is normally a jfs version.
It makes life a lot easier for an admin.

Here is some of the relevant lvm commands in order of use

pvcreate (formats a disk for lvm use , destroys all data currently on disk)

vgcreate

lvcreate

lvextend (allows mirroring as well)

mkreiserfs (8) - The create tool for the Linux ReiserFS filesystem.

resize_reiserfs (8) - resizer tool for the ReiserFS filesystem

reiserfsck (8) - The checking tool for the ReiserFS filesystem.

reiserfstune (8) - The tunning tool for the ReiserFS filesystem.

fsck.reiserfs (8) - The checking tool for the ReiserFS filesystem.

mkfs.reiserfs (8) - The create tool for the Linux ReiserFS filesystem.

debugreiserfs (8) - The debugging tool for the ReiserFS filesystem.

mount (obviously)