hi there,

I'm back again with 1 issue that I'd really like to resolve with everyone's help if possible

I currently run RH 9.0 and already 3 HDDs (maxed because I also use a CD-RW - maybe it's time for me to get a controller to be able to run more IDE devices lol)

The main issue is this: I have a 120GB ATA HDD that still has the NTFS formatted partition on it which currently serves as my storage drive or at least used to under Windows => IT'S BASICALLY FULL!

I would like to somehow remove that single huge ntfs partition and create smaller ext3 partitions which will be labelled such as /movies, /mp3s, /data, /backup, /ftp etc...for easier and faster access and also for the capability to WRITE! to each partition

I borrowed my friend's 80GB - I know it's definetely short to store the rest what 30-40 GB, but I can do the small portion via LAN transfer to another system - that shouldn't be a problem.

Now my Question is, I have never added a HDD to LINUX, I did some research and read that I can us parted or fdisk, mkfs and e21label to get all this done.

- I first would like to create a 80gb ext3 partition on my friend's empty HDD (some suggestions here would be helpful)

- then I would like to copy data over from the 120GB to the 80GB until it reaches it's hdd space limit (this step is no problem for me)

- after that I would have to remove the single ntfs partition off the 120GB, create many "smaller" ext3 partitions and then simply re-transfer data from the 80GB to the newer smaller associated partitions (some suggestions here might be helpful regarding creating new partitions)

Can anyone tell me in small steps how to achieve this? I would really appreciate any help and support with this issue as I don't really want to lose 120GB of my data ) - THANK YOU VERY MUCH guys (sorry for the caps)

you seem to be on the right track. if you put the 80gig in your machine and run "cfdisk" you can then rewrite the partition tableof that drive. then "mkfs.ext3" and you'll have a new 80gig ext3 partition on that drive. add a line like this to /etc/fstab

/dev/hd?? /new80 ext3 defaults 0 0

where /dev/hd?? is the device of the new drive (/dev/hdd1)
then you can mount it and start moving stuff over.

the procedure is the same for setting up your 120gig
although it might not me a great idea to put each thing on a seperate partition, cause if youre ratio of say mp3's to movies changes a bunch you might run out of room on one partition while you still have space on another.
in either case you can make your partitions from cfdisk.

hope thats helpful

hi ocularbob,

thanks a lot for your response!

I don't seem to have cfdisk and it wouldn't find it with whereis cfdisk either, so is it possible it's on your slackware and not on my RH?

should I run fdisk with some parameters instead? Thanks again for your help!


ps.: You're right, I should probably just make 1 huge 120GB ext3 partition and get everything settled that way....

i think fdisk would be fine too
or maybe there is some sort of RH tool?

ls /sbin | grep disk