Hello Everybodypeeps,

I have looked around (searched the forums) and couldn't find an answer for my question (though I am crap at finding this sort of thing!)...

I have Mandrake Linux 8.2 on a PC with 20GB space arranged like this: -

hda1 243MB /
hda5 392MB swap
hda6 2.9GB /usr
hda7 14GB /var
hda8 478MB /home

I have things sort-of how I want them, but I now want to introduce another disk to use to store my FTP, WWW & SMB stuff...

I want it to contain my extranet, ftp files and I want it to be available as a windows file share on my LAN.

I am soon to have an ExoServer. No, I'm not loaded, I work at intY, and am quite happy with setting up my Mandrake Linux server on the DMZ and firewall rules etc etc but I have yet to learn how to add this new drive, do not know the best way to use it & would really appreciate some advice ;-)

Should I just format the entire drive with one large (Ok, huge!) partition and call it /data (how would I do that) or muck about with multiple partitions?

If it's done as /data, (I have data on /var/www/html that I want on /data/something) how would I best set things up? I suppose I'd just adjust my apache document root to /data/whatever...

I really want to set things up so that I can access selected directories over my LAN (probably by SAMBA?), please advise...

Have I got it all wrong? Please let me know your thoughts / opinions.

How to handle my "hdb1 111GB (Linux Native)"?

I look forward to all your replies ;-)

I think it's a good idea to use partitions for www, ftp, smb. You should decide how much space you need for them.
Mount pints are not very important. You may name one of the partitions /var/www/html (and mofify /etc/fstab to mount it at boot), the same with other ones.
Files access can be done using Samba, but ftp will do, too.
Last suggestion: I think you should choose ReiserFS or Ext3 as your filesystem for those partitions, not Ext2.