Hello everyone,

I have FC5 on a IBM machine that runs as a dedicated file server. It's got a 300GB IDE hard drive that stores everything, including backups. I want to add a new 40GB IDE hard drive so I can move the backups to that drive and keep it isolated.

I have absolutely no idea how to add the new drive, mount it to either home or home2, anything for that matter, as long as I can create a share using SMB.

I know how to physically add the drive though.

One more thing, as it stands, the drive is currently formatted in NTFS, was a windows hard drive so I'll need to know how to format it as well.

I have no GUI on my box.

I always appreciate the great help that people get on this site, it's priceless.

Regards,
genesis

well first you need to find out where it is in /dev.
that can vary a bit, if this is your second hard drive and if its not sata (from what you said its not)
its more than likely /dev/hdb
to be sure you can do #cfdisk /dev/hdb (MAKE SUR YOU DONT MODIFY ANYTHING UNLESS YOU WANT TO) this is the partition table,
Im sure there is an easier way but that the one i used.
usualy /dev/hda is primary disk, hdb slave, hdc CDROM, hdd cdrom slave but this can vary depending of your system.

now to format
mkfs.*fstype (mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mkfs.reiserfs)
so if you want a ext3 filesystem on that drive
mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdb (or whichever it is)

to mount:
mount *dev *mount point
eg:
mount /dev/hdb /mnt
will mount /dev/hdb to /mnt directory


just be carefull when using cfdisk and mkfs, cfdisk you can use to create partition but make sure you have the right drive
and mkfs well, dont do it on the wrong disk

hope this helps

Thanks, sounds simple assuming there's no detection process, I just turn the machine off, plug the drive on slave, boot it up and format, mount the right drive. I haven't done this and I can't till the end of the day, where would I find the contents of this drive, like /home - where would I move my files to?

EDIT: Doing a #cfdisk /dev/hdb or hda just returns to prompt.

yes, but make sure you find the right drive, it shoudl be two hard, if you have one 300gb and one 40gb
where its going to be mounted is your choice. this is done with mount /dev... /....
let say your drive is /dev/hdb, you format with:
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb
and you want that drive for backup, so you create a backup directory in /home/BAK like this:
sudo mkdir /home/BAK

then you would mount it like this:
sudo mount /dev/hdb1 /home/BAK
*notice the "1" this is the partition number

then change the permission on that directory:
sudo chmod +w /home/BAK

now you can move your file into that disk like this
cp (file) /home/BAK

That sounds ok to me, think i'll have no problems. But, is there a way to see my current list of devices? Currently I don't have the second HD plugged in.

Thanks a lot for the help, it was a piece of cake. This was the first time I've ever added a harddrive to an existing linux installation and it's apparently just as easy as adding a harddrive in windows.

try lshw this will give you a lot of info
you may want to pipe it to less: lshw | less
glad i could help