Advice needed on FC2 partitioning and multiple drives
 

I am having a problem with the way my disks are configured on this system. When I asked for a second machine to use to teach myself Linux, I received an old clunker with a 4 GB hard drive. I installed FC2, Gnome and several RPMS that I was interested in. At that point, I was already below 1 GB of disk space. I asked around the office and was able to get my hands on a 60 GB that no one seemed to need. I installed the large drive in the machine, formated it with ext3 and mounted it as /bigdog.

My problem is, I don't seem to be able to make much use of the additional space. It seems to me that Linux programs and utilities tend to expect things to be in certain well-known places in the file system and write and read to those locations automatically. Particularly with RPM's, I haven't figured out a way to control the install to point to the new drive.

Here are some things I've considered:

--Blow away the machine, remove the old 4 GB drive and rebuild it entirely on the 60 GB drive. This do-able because I have nothing on the machine that I can't live without, but I won't learn anything from that activity that I don't already know. Besides, I done a fair amount of customization and I don't want to start over unless I have to.

--Move data from the default location to the new drive and try to work around the consequences of having files in locations that are not the Linux "norm" . One thing I'm investigating is creating symbolic links for directories that I move. Is this feasible or wise? Can anyone point me to good source for how to work with symbolic links.? I'm sure I can move the swap file, but that really isn't very big.

--Explore ways to control software installation to put new information on the big drive. Figure out the implications of having something installed whose absolute path includes an extra directory before the root.

Other than that, I'm not sure what to do. Hopefully, one of you nice people out there will have a good answer for me.

Regards,

dbruso
Linux newbie and humble MS expatriate

The two best options are probably to start over or move one of the large directory structures like /usr or /usr/bin over to the new drive, then mounting it in place of the old directory.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as copying the files. Almost, but not quite.

Check this page out for an example of how to move your /home directory: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...-partplan.html

I think I have another example around somewhere too; I'll post it if I can find it.

BTW, one of the problems is that you need to delete the items under /usr or /usr/bin on the old drive before you mount the new one, but the commands for removing the files and mounting the partition are there, so it can get tricky.

Here's another take on it:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=148335