LeRoy Cressy on 20 Sep 2004 22:38:02 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] Adding a second HD to a Linux system


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Aaron Crosman wrote:
| I noticed today that I'm starting to use up the 1 HD in one of my Linux
| systems.  So I'd like to add a second.  Having never done this under
| Linux before I thought I'd better ask for suggested reading before I
| take on the task.  Are there any pitfalls, or cautions I should be
| careful of?
|
| Since the server uses much of it's Disk space for web server staging I
| figure I'll move the web server docs and the home directories there.
| Any reason that's a bad idea?
|
| Thanks for any guidance.
| Aaron

The first thing is to buy a drive that has the greatest warranty.  There
are a lot of cheap HD's on the market that are the pits and have
virtually no warranty.  For servers I buy drives with a 5 year warranty.
~ A little extra spent can save a lot of headaches in the future.

Since this is a server that you are adding the drive to You might have
SCSI drives already installed in the box along with a SCSI controller.

After you have determined what is already installed on the system, get a
compatable drive that matches the cpu.  A number of the newer drives
that have huge capacities have a tough time being read by some older CPU's

When you install the drive partition the drive with either fdisk or
cfdisk.  I have found cfdisk is a little easier to use for the new user.

After the drive is partitioned you need to determine what filesystem you
want to use on the partitions.  I prefer ext3 while others prefer
reiserfs.  With Linux you have a lot of choices.  With a home directory
I like to manually set the options with the following command:

mke2fs -c -b 1024 -i 1024 -j -m 1 /dev/sdb1
	-c	Check for bad blocks
	-b	Block size the default is 4096
	-i	Inode size
	-j	Create a journal
	-m	percentage reserved for lost+found directory default is 	
		5%  With gigs of space 5% is a bit much.
	/dev/sdb1	SCSI Drive
	/dev/hdb1	IDE  Drive

After you have created the filesystems, you should edit /etc/fstab to
reflect the new mount points.

Another item is to copy the old partitions to the new partitions using a
temporary mount point for the new partitions.

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp
cp -a /home/* /mnt/tmp
umount /mnt/tmp
umount /home
mount /dev/sdb1 /home

I hope that this helps :-)

LeRoy

- --
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