Currently, my server has 3 hard drives. One has Mandrake 10 on it and the other two are just data drives.

I just bought a new 250GB hard drive for data, so I'm going to pull one of the smaller data drives out and put in the new one. So, I was wondering....


Would it be better to just put the new drive in my Windoze PC and use Partitian Magic to make it a Linux partitian or should I just remove one of the drives in the Linux server and reformat it there?

When I installed Linux on the server, I just let the Mandrake install do its thing because it's a pure Linux box. But, quite frankly, I don't want to spend a lot of time jumping through hoops to reformat the new drive. Does anyone know if Mandrake will sense the new hardware and allow me to set it up accordingly?

Basically:
Firstly if you're swapping out an old one, you'll want to edit /etc/fstab so the new one isnt mounted before it's formatted to a filesystem.
Then turn off and swap the drives.
Then you should be able to use the Mandrake Control Center to format and partition the new drive, and specify where to mount it, which will automatically add a new fstab entry for you.