Here's the situation:

I've got a samba server sharing out a directory under /home ( /home/share ) which is on it's own large partition. It has filled up now, but I have another equally large partition available on another physical disk.

I am trying to find the best way to combine these partitions.

Im thinkin of simply mounting the new partition like: /home/share/vol2 or something like that. But i kind of don't like that.

Is there any way to combine /dev/hda4 and /dev/hdb4 into one mount point? Both are 40G, so the result would ideally be a mount point of /home/share with 80G available and transparent to samba and the users.

Or perhaps there's a way to do this using links...? Like mount the new partition under root as /opt. Then create a directory /opt/share and link to it under /home/share somehow.

Bloody lot's of ways to do it, but what makes the most sense? Im looking for learned advice....

Many thanks
Danimalz

PS server is running debian 2.4 kernel. Both physical drives are on the same IDE cable.

NOTE: Prior to doing anything with what follows you'd need to backup what is currently in your /home/share filesystem then restore it afterwards.

You can combine the devices together using Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Basically it is designed to combine multiple disks or partitions into one Volume Group (VG) which can be thought of as a virtual disk. This in turn can be subdivided into Logical Volumes (LVs) which can be thought of a virtual partitions. In your case you'd just need to create a VG that included the two real partitions then create a single LV that used up the entire space. You'd then make that a filesystem and mount it:

man lvm = LVM overview

man pvcreate = How to ready devices to be part of a VG

man vgcreate = How to create a volume group

man lvcreate = How to create a logical volume

Hopefully you already know how to do mkfs and add entries to fstab for mounting.