I am new to, well somewhat new to Linux. I do not know the in's and out's of details about the os or anything, but I really enjoy messing around with the Linux distros. I have chosen this distro for an old computer and think that I will really like it. I'm setting it up on an older desktop that has 2 small hard drives. one is a 9 gig drive and the other is a 40 gig. I have had no problems installing it to the 9 gig, but that leaves the larger drive kinda useless. I want to know how to set up the second drive so that any software I download and install to the system will use that drive. I have tried gparted, but no luck so far. I even tried to find other programs in the package manager to make changes but that didn't work ether. I even have tried to do a custom install but could only select one drive for anything I wanted to do. I need to know if what I want to do is possible, and the easiest way to do it. I know or at least understand a little about the file structures, and about root and non root stuff although I am no expert. if someone can give me a step by step guild, it would be very helpful. thanks.

HI repulsivefrog.

Not sure if my tutorial wil fit the bill. If wanting to install AntiX into seperate / and /home partitions is what you are shooting for. 9 gig for / and rest of drive for /home.

antix-11-eeepc-900-install-finished-t3104.html

I hope you get a general idea from my tutorial. I have not made a tutorial for single drive laptop install as I just use the whole drive anymore for install which in your case would be
49 gig for /. I found that liqourix kernel upgrades using smxi script go better/no errors with that kind of setup vs a dual partition setup.

Happy Trails, Rok

What you want to do is possible, and it's not very difficult.
You can mount all things where you want, even after installation.
Programs which get installed will end in /usr; and that often is mounted on a separate partition.
But 9Gig's for root ( / ) should be (more than) sufficient.
(If you plan to compile a lot of software on your own, instead of using pre-compiled binaries, you ~might~ need more, else you don't need a lot of space for /. In fact i often install on hard-disks which are less than 5Gigs.

Like rokytnji said the best solution is probably to use the second hard-drive for /home
You can either make a separate folder, say /home/username/data, and mount it there, or you mount all of home at the other drive.
To do so you would -more or less simply- edit the file /etc/fstab.
If someone shall tell you what you have to do you should post
a) the content of /etc/fstab
b) the output of the command"fdisk -l" ; run as root, but without quotas
c) say what you want (for example: i want to mount all of home at the second drive, i still want to mount /usr there, or something like that).

Using a folder called"data" in home has got a few advantages, in my humble opinion.
(one being: You want to backup the whole operating system, including your user settings. All you have to do is umount /home/username/data, and you can backup the whole thing easily. Once done remount"data", and all is fine).

Assuming your second drive is /dev/sdb1, the entry in fstab would look similar to this: after creating the folder called"data".
run"mount -a" and test if it works. After the reboot it should be mounted automatically.
Using UUID's is better than device names (like /dev/sdb1) and the command"blkid" will tell you which is the UUID you are looking for.

I did not look at the how-to of rokytnji, and it might be more clear than what i just wrote.
If in doubt post the output of"fdisk -l" and the content of /etc/fstab (like said)
As long you don't run out of space there doesn't seem to be much pressure to do anything at all. __{{emoticon}}__

good luck