combining drive space into one big space

[Peter Simpson]

On Thursday 24 Mar 2005 04:02, David Foster wrote:
> Ok I got questions,
>  I have been running mythtv on Ubuntu for three months and am running out
> of hard drive space :)  It chews up about 2 gigs an hour then if it has
> enough free space it transcodes them down to 650megs and hour.
>  I have one 40g drive with a 30gig partition devoted to recorded
> shows, mounted as /myth , the others, /root /cache and swap ocuppy the
> rest. So /myth in now almost full and I have in my hand a extra 30gig
> hard drive that I plan to stuff in.
>  My question is, can I combine the exsisting 30gig /myth with the new
> drive(after I freshly format it) to make one big 60g /myth. I was
> thinking possibly a configuring them in an array? or can I just mount
> them both as /myth and let the files fly.
>  One sticking point may be that I don't really want to loose the
> 27gig of shows that are on there right now.
>  Any suggestions would be appreciated( know, fork out the money and
> buy a bigger drive).
> --
> David Foster
> dbfoster at gmail.com
>
> Ubuntu/Hoary
> Durron 687/256m/40g/gforce440/wintvGo/packard bell remote (your basic
> getto system :)

The solution to your query is something called LVM (Logical Volume Manager).

This allows you to do precisely what you are attempting.

I currently have it combining 4 disks into one almighty(?!) 28GB partition. 
(There are two 20GB and two 4GB disks).

I found the following howtos most constructive:

http://deb.riseup.net/storage/lvm2/

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lvm2.xml


What you will need to do is create a new Logical Volume on your new hard disk, 
then copy over the data from your old hard disk and then expand the volume 
onto your new hard disk.

Good luck,
TreeBoy