Adding 2nd hard drive with data on it

MichaelH23 · 11-22-2005, 05:24 PM

Hi, I'm running CentOS 4.2 on hard drive a. I have hard drive b (formatted with ext3 from a previous fedora PC) and I want to add the 2nd hard drive to the system w/o wiping out the files on it. Last time I just added a line (just like hda, but hdb) to the /etc/fstab file and was subsequently unable to boot back into that OS, so I installed CentOS 4.2...

Anyway, I'm looking into an emergency boot floppy so I can change back any stupid changes I make to fstab so I can use it to change back w/o reinstalling a new OS :-)

The gui Hardware Browser can see the 2nd hard drive by the way as /dev/hdb. The system is set up with LVM.

jailbait · 11-22-2005, 05:44 PM

"I have hard drive b (formatted with ext3 from a previous fedora PC) and I want to add the 2nd hard drive to the system w/o wiping out the files on it."

Create an empty directory for each new partition that you want to mount. Add a line to /etc/fstab for each partition on the new hard drive and set the new directories as the mountpoints for the additional partitions. Make sure that the new entries in /etc/fstab are somewhere after the entry for /.

-----------------------------
Steve Stites

MichaelH23 · 11-23-2005, 01:10 AM

Hi Steve, thanks for the reply. Here's what I did to fstab:
/dev/hdb/ /dvr ext3 defaults 1 1

I copied the settings for the line that has the /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 and put it after the /
directory. The /dvr means I think that I want the drive to show up as /dvr directory.

It didn't get mounted however, even tho it's visible. I'm familiar with Windows formatting and mounting of hard drives. Is the LVM getting in the way? I think I'm going to mess around with trying to manually mount it if I can.

Michael

MichaelH23 · 11-23-2005, 01:28 AM

Hi Steve again! I got it this time. I was just playing with the mount command from the command line and figured out that I had to create a dir as a mount point before I could mount the device (because running the command gave me the error that the mount point doesn't exist--so I googled around til I got a page that told me some details and I got it). So I just created /dvr, then ran the mount command, and voila! access.

Then I rebooted and it comes up now automagically. Thanks! Michael.