could i install on another hdd?

[JekylHyde]

Hi
i have a live mint
A. could i install apps on another hdd & not on the drive that linux is running on?
B. could i make it save all my system changes to another drive?
thanks

[Roxoff]

The Linux filesystem is already geared up for some of this - take a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The filesystem layout doesn't rely on any part of it being on one drive or another - or even on a local or remote drive. It contains layout places like /usr/local which is intended to contain machine-centric installs of software mounted from a local source while /usr could be mounted from some nfs or remote server.

It used to be quite common to see servers the hard disks mounted on physical mount points (like /media/disk1 and similar) and the major directories connected to these by symbolic link. This can work quite well, with a bit of planning, you can mount up bits of your filesystem from other drives or other servers.

The only limitation with this is that the server needs to be able to read /etc/fstab when it boots - otherwise it cannot find which filesystems to mount. This makes it hard to put your /etc directory on a different filesystem.

Of course, these days LVM takes care of this for you so you don't have to. You can just put all your local disks into one logical volume and mount them as one block. You can even give yourself a small root partition on a physical volume, then put all your /home into a logical volume, and then nfs-mount any extra bits you want off the network.

[JekylHyde]

ok so how to do this?
i'm pretty new to this...
i have now xubuntu

[Roxoff]

I suggest that you try to understand the ln command by reading its man page, then take a look at the filesystem hierarchy and see how it compares to your system. Then you can decide what you think is appropriate to move to another drive.

[JekylHyde]

what you're saying is to copy the directories & leave a link to them on the original location there were?