Filesystems, Disks and Memory

We have 6 hard disks attached to the hardware. Of this 2 hard disks are of 9 GB each.

Now I want combine both the same in such a way that i see a combined entry in the output of df -k .

The steps I follow are

1. Create partition on hard disks (Using format partition)
2. Run newfs -v for the partition
3. create an entry in /etc/vsftab (with common mount point)
3. mount the file system.

When I do this for the 2nd hard disk with same mount point , it does not allow stating mountpoint busy (naturally earlier one already mounted).

So I suppose same mount point may not be assigned to different file system .

So think there should be a way to have a single file system for partitions from 2 physical hard disks . I don't know how.

Can anybody help.

Thanks in advance.

Hitesh

what i think your trying to do is combine two seperate drives at one mount point, right? so say i have /dev/hda1 and i have /dev/hdb1 ,
you would want to mount them at /usr/twodriveshere/ ? well AFAIK mount cant do that. something like that is what raid is for, however maybe i missed something going through the mount man page--- or maybe there is another way to do it that im not aware of. go through the mount man pages, as i might have missed something. else search google for 'RAID' . i think you will find your solution with raid.

There might be a way to do this, it depends on your OS. For example, HP-UX has LVM which lets you take physical disks and combine them into a pool of storage. Then you can create logical disks out of that pool. The logical disk seems to be a single disk. You newfs it once and you mount it once. But it can consume two physical disks. Look at the docs for your OS and see if it has a volume manager package.

You can possibly look at concatenating & striping.
If your OS is Solaris, there are disk management softwares like Solstice DiskSuite

See this for a summary of it.

Thanks everybody for ur contributions . I'll check ur suggestions and get back to u.

FYI we are having SOLARIS 8.

Sun has addressed virtual volume management with two
software packages: Solstice DiskSuite and Sun StorEdge Volume
Manager.

DiskSuite is used primarily on smaller servers and workstations.

StorEdge product is used on the larger Enterprise servers to manage Sun's StorEdge disk arrays.

For more Information look at:

http://docs.sun.com/


Note: If you can, use Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System.

Regards.Hugo

Dear All ,

Thanks to u all for ur help.

We could successfully set up meta devices using Disk Suit tool 4.2.1 gui.