New problems with adding hard-drive to the docking station.

[Kamath <kamath@cs.odu.edu>]

Hi All!!

I have got the PCMCIA modem problem sorted out. I am not sure what the
problem was but it does look like it needed the "generic serial" kernel
module that was it needed as far as the device irq conflicts and stuff
goes. I followed some of the things in the ISP how-to and somehow the
modem started dialling atleast!! But now the problem is one of PAP
authentication failure. I checked the PAP-secrets file and made sure it
had the correct user-name and password neeed for authentication at the
dial-up server. I get the message saying 
"panic looks like a login prompt ...
sent login and password ....."
and in the syslog file in /var/log the message is "PAP authentication
failed. I am using Debian 2.2 potato with 2.2.18pre21 version of the
kernel.

Now another thins I have been doing in the adventure of mine with
linux/debian is adding a hard-disk to the docking station. here is the
set-up i have. I have a 486 laptop(Compaq LTE Elite) with 1.3 GB hard-disk
space. And a docking station attached to this lap-top. Now the kernel is
able to access the docking system devices(or devices in the docking
system, like PS/2 mouse ports, the newly added hard-disk via some (lap-top
to docking station) interface, (I dont know what exactly the
interface is but it appears to be a PCMCIA type III port)

now i would like to add the new hard-drive i added to the docking bay. I
tried the command 
prompt> mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hdb 
and got the message
/dev/hdb is an entire device, not just one partition!
proceed anyway?(y, n)     -----> i answer y here and get the message
mkfs.ext2: Device not configured while trying to determine filesystem size


My question is am i doing the right thing here? in running the mkfs
command directly?? or do i need to do any configuring here?? which seems
very likely here from the messages, and if so how??

thanks,
praveen