I recently installed Redhat on an old P2 laptop. It works like a champ and i am extremely pleased. However the laptop only comes with 2.5 GB of hard drive space. Using the system over the last couple of weeks has the drive at 60% of its capacity. Thats making me anxious that someday i will have to deal with space issues. I was successfully able to map a Windows file system from another machine on my network via Samba on /mnt. I have always wondered if i can mount this additional windows file system on / (root) rather than a sub directory of /. That way i can add virtual hard drive
I'm reasonably sure that this is possible, however there are some limitations. First of all you can't have a remote root filesystem which is smbfs (i.e. mounted directly from a windows share) because it won't support things like links, device nodes, file permissions, etc. Second, it's awkward (not impossible, just awkward) to replace your root filesystem when the machine is running. It's virtually impossible to do it if you've got a lot of software running. What does should is:
1. Create a share on a Windows box.
2. Verify that you can mount he share in Linux and create multiple up-to-2gb each empty files on that share with commands like
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=<number of KB> of=imagefile.bin
(you can probably do this more quickly by running dd under cygwin or some other product directly on the Windows box).
3. Make filesystems in the image files.
4. Make sure that you can loopback mount these filesystems, e.g. $ mkdir -p /mnt/test $ mount -oloop -t ext3 imagefile.bin /mnt/test
5. Put appropriate data into the filesystems.
6. Create an initial ramdisk for your system, mkinitrd will not help much here. Normal Redhat inital ramdisks just provide kernel modules so that you can access the hardware needed in order to mount filesystems locally. You need to build your own initial ramdisk which contains enough of a root filesystem that it can bring up your network adaptor mount the SMB filesystem, and then mount the loopback filesystem as root (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Loopback-Root-FS.html will probably be helpful here).
7. Boot your system up and hope for the best. How well it works will largely depend on how well Samba and whatever version of Windows you're using interact with each other.
n.b. A much easier solution in my experience is just to give the laptop more hdd space. Replacing hard disks in old laptops can be a nightmare, but getting a PCMCIA IDE controller is not too expensive.
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