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

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

On 3 Jan 2001, Thomas Vogels wrote:

> 
> Kamath <kamath@cs.odu.edu> writes:
> 
> > 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
> 
> should have said no here!  /dev/hdb is the whole disk, not usable for
> a file system.  That means you would do "fdisk /dev/hdb" because you
> want to have access to the whole hard drive.  But then you have to
> partition the harddrive, giving you devices like /dev/hdb1 and
> /dev/hdb2 ...  You can then create file systems on the partitions.
>

fdisk gives an error saying cant open file /dev/hdb 

when I do a 
prompt> more /dev/hdb
i get the same error..
the additional HD is an enhanced IDE disk, jumper settings are configured
as the primary slave.

One thing to remember is that the additional hard-disk is accessed by the
kernel via the dock interface. might this be a factor?? especially since
the device naming convention hda/hdb/hdc etc probably stand for HD's
connected to the mother-board directly??

does any one have any clue on this??


> If you want to have just one partition, start up fdisk or cfdisk with
> /dev/hdb as the argument and create one big partition (n or  new).  Be
> careful when partioning your hard drive.  You could lose data if you
> pick the wrong drive. 

thanks,
Praveen