Hi

moved over to Linux Mandrake 10 and loving it that much Im dumping Windows.

To do this im planning the following and would like you guys to point out any pitfalls and answer my questions.

At the moment I have two 40 Gb Hard drives. One has XP on It the other is split into three partitions, 10gig for Mandrake 10, 10gig and a 20gig for my windows media.

My plan Is to Take out the XP hard drive and keep it for a rainy day. I then Plan to reinstall mandrake over the whole of the second 40gig hard drive and put in my new additional 120gig hardrive for storing large media files.

Now what I cant get my head round is how to partition the second hard drive. What file system type do I make it ? ext2 or journalised fsext3. And do I call it /Home? And where do I mount it. Remember I want to be able to download and access large media files on the 120gig.

Sorry Im a bit confused.

Thanks for the Help

If you don't want more than one partition on the 120Gb it's easy. Just make a big primary partition with fdisk and put a filesystem on it. ext3 is certainly an improvement on ext2. Use mkfs.ext3 to create the fs. Other types will have their advocates, but I am not sure what the advantages are for the general user.

Mount it anywhere you like. But not on an existing directory. Make a new directory e.g. /media
(which will be on the original disk, in root filesystem) and mount it on there. Just put an entry in /etc/fstab like

/dev/hdb1 /media ext3 defaults 0 2

Do 'mount /dev/hdb1' and it should be there. It will mount automatically after reboot.

I would work under the assumption that I was going to stick with Linux if my primary drive died, and make the whole 120GB one bit ext3 partition. You could do ext2, but ext3 is basic'ly ext2 journalised, which means your data is usually safer. If you want to put the WinXP drive in occasionally, you can access the storage drive with a program that lets Windows read/write Linux filesystems. Search Google for it.

If you have or can get a Win98 bootdisk, you could make the 120GB one big FAT32 partition, just in case you wanted to use it in Windows more often and easier. But, a FAT32 partition that large suffers in performance. Otherwise, you could split it into four 32GB partitions. Any Windows version after 98 won't create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB... Just because they want you to buy a version of NT and use NTFS.

You could make it one big NTFS partition, but Linux read/write support is still questionable, in my opinion. The specs for NTFS are closed, so developers have just have been working blindfolded trying to make Linux read/write NTFS partitions. I would much rather occassionally trust the ext2/3 program in Windows than constantly trust NTFS in Linux.

Side Note: If you are using Linux to control the booting of Windows, be sure to restore the Master Boot Record on the WinXP drive before you remove it. Boot Windows, and go to the Control Panel, somewhere in there is the storage control program. I don't know for sure what you need to do in there, but make sure the system boots straight to Windows before you remove that first drive. Otherwise, you'll need to use the WinXP install disk to boot to repair mode to restore the MBR.

As for mounting, I'm a traditionalist, and would just do /mnt/storage . You could make it home, but then you'd have a lot of space on the 40GB drive that would just be sitting empty. Put home on the 40GB, and then you can make a link in your home directory to /mnt/storage for easier access.

Thanks Guys for the super fast repies.

I havn't even got home from work yet!

You have put my mind at ease and pointed out some pitfalls (like the xp boot).

Can't wait for 4 o clock.

Cheers

Not sure what I have done wrong but I Just cant mount my 120gig harddrive.

When I produce an Icon on the desktop for it it opens up the 40gig hard drive.

The fstab seems a bit more complicted than examples I have read especially the bottom lines.

Here it is

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb1 /media ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,auto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-15,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
none /mnt/hd supermount dev=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0


Just to let you know I have a 40gig as my OS drive 120gig for media. A cdrw drive and a dvdrw drive.

Hope you can help.

For the large drive, I would use XFS.

I use it on my file server, and in a 1.34 GB write test, XFS finished nearly 50 seconds faster than ReiserFS. Very fast, especially with large files.

As for the mounting problem, what exactly is wrong? Are you sure you are trying to mount the correct drive?

Try:

dmesg | grep hd

That should bring up all your boot messages about IDE drives, and you should be able to see what letters the drives were assigned.

Open a console window and (as root) run command 'fdisk -l' to check that your disk is recognised. If not check the hardware connections, and see if the BIOS can find the disk when the system is rebooted. Normally fdisk should give something like

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 49 197536+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 50 787 2975616 83 Linux

(This is a second HD with two partitions). If all looks OK then run command 'mount /dev/hdb1' (assuming that is the partition you are using) or even 'mount /media' and it should either get mounted or give an informative error message.

Command line is always more reliable than playing with desktop icons when setting things up for the first time.

As for suggestions about file system type, there could well be significant differences on certain tasks, and some more research or experimentation might get better performance in your particular situation, as MS3FGX says.

I've used mandrake 9.0 in the past and I found that the GUI used for hard drive partitioning was very good and easier to use bvecause you can see what is going on. Sorry I can not remember what its called. I seem to remember that it configured the fstab file when finished etc. Give it a go as for how to set it up all I can tell you is that if you use a capital for the first letter the folder will be near the top and easier to find.

good luck

Thanks everyone I have managed to mount the drive but now I cant write to it.

Any tips.

I will keep researching meenwhile

You can't write to it as a user, or can't write to it at all?

If you can write to it as root and not as a normal user, you need to change the permissions on the mount point.

If you can't write to it at all....

Thanks gusy

Signed in as root and changed the permissions at the mount point.

Wooha case closed. Nice learning curve there I think

Many thanks