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Re: Multiple Hard Drives



On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 12:25:36AM -0500, Shawn McCuan wrote:
> Yet another question from me. I have two maxtor hardrives, but, debian 
> isnt even showing that I have a second hard drive. I want to format the 
> second hardrive to EXT3 so its compatible with the OS, but, if its not 
> showing up anywhere that I can see, what should I do?
> 
> Thanks;
> Shawn McCuan
> A linux newbie...
> 

Shawn -

The messages you've gotten have lots of good information in them. Perhaps a
little overview would help.

First, your linux system has detected the hard drive (dmesg said so when it
referred to hdb).

Second, you need to partition the hard drive. fdisk does that. If the hard
drive already has information on it (like some windows data), then you may
not want to change the partition scheme. Otherwise, as one of the other
posters said, you can just set up a single partition for the whole disk.

Third, you need to have a file system on the hard drive. ex2fs does that for
the ext2 or ext3 file systems (fairly standard for linux). This is somewhat
equivalent to formatting the hard drive in dos.

Fourth, you need to mount the hard drive partition somewhere in your linux
file scheme. The mount program does this. Once you have figured out how to
do this, you will want to update /etc/fstab so that this mount operation
occurs automatically at startup.

These steps are needed only when you first attach a new hard drive. After
that, your operating system will automatically mount the partition(s)
wherever you specified in /etc/fstab.

The man pages for each of these programs can be quite useful. Also, look on
the linux documentation project for how-to's about adding a new hard drive.

Good luck.

Ollie
> 
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-- 
|---------------------------|
| Ollie Acheson             |
| Morristown, NJ            |
|---------------------------|



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