I have (4) 250Gb HDs

hda2 - boot/puppy kernel
hda4 - Primary Ext3
hdb1 - Extended
hdc1 - Extended
hdd1 - Extended

My goal is to use Samba and identify the 4 drives to appear as one share on local network.

Is this possible?

Thank you.

Since your main purpose is to span disks and share using Samba, I'd recommend you use either FreeNAS or OpenFiler to do the job. They both are excellent for the file server type of applications. Both support Samba, and are reasonably easy to configure and use, since both have a browser based configuration interface.

You should create an LVM of the disks and make them appear as one large disk, then create partitions as you need.

I'll second the LVM idea. You can use samba to simply share the entire space of the 3 additional drives, but they won't be offered as one huge 750 Gb space, it will be offered as 3 seperate 250 Gb spaces. If somebody tried to upload a 300 Gb file, they couldn't.

You could use LVM to make the 3 drives feel like one single drive, which will give you about 700 Gb of usable space. I have 4 250 Gb satas in a hardware raid 5, and I have about 700 usable. The 250 is an estimate size, and not very accurate. it is more like 237 Gb each I think. In any case, this page has good suggestions for how to setup the LVM, and then simply mount the LVM somewhere, and share that location through samba.

http://www.pma.caltech.edu/~laurence/Linux/lvm.html

Peace,
JimBass

Thanks you both. I will try later tonight and post results.

-Faron