How to span disk in linux

[TechGate]

Hi all,

Could someone help me to for a tutorial on how to add another drive to a Woody install so it acts as one large drive?

It seems to me that the last time I tried this (about a year ago) I set up two small drives as one large one (disk spanning) but cannot find any information this time around. I have found how to add another drive but not how to make them act as one.

Thanks in advance,

[jesse]

The disk spanning is one of the procedure to add different hard disk as one.Using this technique,the Linux would assume to the number of hard disk as one hard disk.It doesn't happen only in Linux,it also can be implemented in the windows environment and there are so much examples,I have seen with my friends and colleague.

You can span more than one disk using different tools which is provided free and payable also on the internet.One of the tool in linux also can do this.

[SalVatore]

I think the Logical Volume Manager can be helpful for you to implement the disk spanning.The Logical Volume Management is one of the tool provided by linux operating system and it is very primary way to handle the UNIX storage systems with the scalable, forward-thinking manner.

A Logical Volume Manager (LVM) divides the disk drives into different segments of storage space known as Volume Groups (VGs). after then The divided Volume Groups is categorized into virtual disks called Logical Volumes (LVs) which would be used as regular disks within the filesystems generated on them, and mounted in the UNIX filesystem tree.

Benefits of Logical Volume Management

Logical Volume Management facilitates us to manage the disk partition in a better way.After creating virtual segments of space,the system admin can assign some little size of memory according to the requirement of a system users.

The Logical volume manager includes the additional logical layer or two between the storage device and the applications.

1- Volume Groups
2- Logical Volumes
3- LVM for Linux

[Devasis]

Creating Physical Volumes for LVM

LVM needs whole Physical Volumes to be allocated to Volume Groups,you need to have some unused partitions ready to be used by LVM. Install the OS on a some partitions and leave a bit of unallocated memory.

Use fdisk command under Linux to made the desired number of new partitions of which should be same size. You must check them with fdisk as type 0xFE.Some of the other operation are performed in this section .

After creating physical volume,you need to register this and then jump on the logical section -

Creating a Volume Group
Creating a Logical Volume
Adding a disk to the Volume Group
Creating a striped Logical Volume

These are the task would be performed during the spanning of the disk.