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I am fairly new to linux and after I repaired my moms laptop with a broken HDD by installing Ubuntu on an SD card, I thought I might want to change my OS too; since I learned to hate bloody Windows-Broken-DeveloperVersion-Install#5-8 running on a 60GB SSD, using up 50GB.

Anyways - I am still not shure what to do with my two drives - a 64GB SSD and a 500GB HDD. I am used to storing the OS and drivers on C: and Data and Programms on D: from windows.

  • Can I sort of combine them and mount them both under the system root?
  • How can I tell a package to install to dev/sdb not dev/sda using the PackageStore, Synaptic or apt-get?
  • Is there a way to tell the system to use both devices acording to the required volume with a higher priority on the SSD without the need to manually mount them?

Thank you! :)

0rube
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1 Answers1

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Packages are being installed rather in proper directories/paths, not on disks as such - better to leave Windows thinking style aside. What counts here is the directory tree - starting from / - aka root filesystem, and then, for example:

/boot /bin /sbin /home /var /tmp /root

etc.

Those can be just directories or mountpoints - where other disks can be mounted to. From logical point of view then you'll see for example still the same /home, but instead of your SSD disk, it can be located on HDD disk.

You can install system on SSD disk and use the other, disk mounted under some mountpoint in your directory tree - for example /storage - to keep your stuff there. Whatever you prefer. It doesn't even need to be the whole disk under /storage - depends on how you want to partition your disk. Again - for example: /dev/sdb1 (first partition of your HDD disk, let's say) may be /storage, and /dev/sdb2 (the other partition - of whatever side) can be i.e. /home

If you have something on your hdd disk, that you'd like to keep - you, most likely, don't even need to format it - just specify the proper filesystem type in mount command. Might be worth also to have a look at /etc/fstab if you want to mount the other disk automatically on startup.

Just anyway be sure also that you don't use as a mountpoint a folder with some stuff in it - after you mount another partition/disk to it, whatever was in the mountpoint directory will be inaccessible - until you unmount the disk again.

It may look a bit twisted, but it's not that difficult after all. But the topic is anyway a bit more complex than one could expect. All depends on what you would exactly like to do.

Jacek
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