Well, okay... So I'm a noob to some extent. I could use some advice on a subject near and dear to our collective hearts: partitioning/drive setup.

Here's the deal: I've been running a Win 2k fileserver with a ton of space on it - 4 X 250 Gb, plus the 80 Gb sys drive, etc., but I recently decided it was time to build a new box... Sooooo... I picked up one of the Fry's specials with an AMD 64 3000+ and a LanParty board. Threw in a Gig o' RAM and thought, HELL! I'll throw Win 2k back on this puppy and call it a day - besides, it's only a FILE SERVER!!! Nope. Not a chance. Driver issues... Corrupting hard drives and generally going crazy... Sooooo.... I grab the Win 2003 Server crap and give it a try. Well, at least the POS runs reliably - but I've only got a 5 user license -- and another 5 users is HOW MUCH??? NFR should become Not Worth Much or something...

So, I decided to go back to my favorite solution: Mandrake.

Well, that would be lovely, but I'm pullin' some hair here! Apparently there are some issues with SATA drives, I take it? So the main drive, hda, is the 80 Gb system drive. Then there are the four SATA 250's (and, hey! Avoid those Maxtor drives, eh? I'm burinin through 'em like WATER!!!) which are sda, sdb, sdc, sdd and as I'm setting them up I'm wondering... HOW SHOULD I PARTITION THESE PUPPIES???

On the Wintel box, they wen't like this: MP3, WORK, WORKII, MOV and then they were shared out to the network.

So I'm thinking, I'd better ask what the suggestion(s) are before I commit myself to some scheme and regret it. Currently, I just named them /sata1, /sata2, etc. to experiment with the setup before final install...

Of course, things couldn't go easier... I complete the Mandrake 10.1 freebie install and do a restart and the system has "issues" with my SATA drives.

Has anybody else been working through these issues? I didn't find any threads that seemed to end in a pleasant outcome... Curious to see if there's a reasonable solution and thanks in advance for your thoughts and input.

DB

I don't know if this will help you in your quest or not, but I'll give it a stab. Once, I had a computer with a small hard drive, so I added another small hard drive for increased space (they were really small, like 4G and 1.6G). What I did was partition the first drive with "/", swap, and "/home". The second drive, I added later. I partitioned it as "/home/corey/extra".

Perhaps you can do something similar, with each drive set up with one partition labelled /home/drbob001/MP3 /home/drbob001/WORK /home/drbob001/WORKII /home/drbob001/MOV, for example. You could then share these drives through samba, as they'll be seen as directories of your /home. This would also assist a bit with security, as these drives would be accessed with the permissions of your user account only. Worth a shot?

I want to say right now, that I have not owned a SATA drive and I haven't tried this to the extent you require, but it seems to make sense. And, Mandy makes network sharing pretty easy, too.

I like the organizational structure and understand your thought process... However, I haven't figured out a solution too dealing with the SATA issue. I'm not even sure that's the problem, yet. Who knows, might even be a driver issue... Ugh.

Gosh, I'm sorry. I read too much into your post. I thought that you had gotten the SATA to work.

Yes, its likely a driver. What chipset does your controller have?

This is a LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb using the nVIDIA nForce3-250Gb Chipset.

Gotta love it. For the time being I had to get the &$%( thing running, so I had to resort to "lovely as ever" Win2003 Server until we can get the drivers sorted out...