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I have 3 hardrives inside my laptop 2 of which currently house other opperating systems but have a empty partitions of 8 and 9 gigabye and the third is just 12 gB (currently not partitioned at all). Now each of these 3 is to small to be useful to me, however combined they are 29gigs which can easily hold a ubuntu installation, and associated programs. Is there a way set up my installation in such a way that it threads these 3 disks as one? Or is there a way by which I can make it default storage of many things into one drive (downloads and sudo apt-get install for example) to one drive while keeping ubuntu onto another?

bain
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Thijser
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You could do it with LVM as documented here and here. But 14.04 now supports btrfs, so I would give that a try:

  • Make a partition on each disk to take up the free space

  • mkfs.btrfs -d single /dev/sdxx /dev/sdyy /dev/sdzz

  • If you want to check the filesystem, do mount /dev/sdxx /mnt; df -h; umount /mnt - df will show the total space of all three devices

  • In Ubuntu installer, select manual partitioning ("something else"), select your btrfs filesystem (any of the 3 devices), set type "btrfs" and mount point "/". Do not check the "format?" checkbox. Click "install now" - the installer will warn "The filesystem... has not been marked for formatting", just click continue.

  • Do the rest of the install as normal

For further details on this approach see Btrfs wiki - Using btrfs with multiple devices.

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bain
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  • Is this before or after installing the new ubuntu installation? I assume it's before but just to be sure? – Thijser Jun 13 '14 at 21:44
  • Before. Make sure you get the partitions right, don't format your existing ones. – bain Jun 13 '14 at 22:55
  • I keep getting "cannot detect existing filesystems use -f option to forice overwrite and if I add -f then I get "could not open /dev/sda3 error checking /dev/sda3 mount status, I have tried with both sda3 mounted and unmounted neither seem to work. – Thijser Jun 15 '14 at 06:05
  • Make sure the partitions are unmounted (lsblk and cat /proc/mounts) before you format them. You could also check the partition type is 83 (Linux) - in theory it does not matter, but it is better to set it correctly. – bain Jun 15 '14 at 15:53