Just installed RHEL 4 for the first time.

Followed all the prompts & defaults from the installation disks, ending up with 2 partitions (hda1 & hda2) taking up the whole 20G hard drive.

I want to use a separate IDE hard drive to store my personal files, so that they can be saved if I have to re-install the OS.

How do I permanently mount this drive?
Where is the best place to mount it?

clue_less

first, do "fdisk -l" (as root) to be sure how the drive is seen by the system. (probably hdb_)

The normal place to mount internal drives is /mnt, but you can put it whereever you want. You may find that RHEL has already made an entry in /mnt (and also possibly mounted the drive)

If you do have to mount it yourself, first create a "mount point" (a directory)--eg "mkdir /mnt/mydata", then add an entry to /etc/fstab which looks soemthing like:
/dev/hdbX /mnt/mydata xxxx defaults 0 0
(replace X with the correct partition #, and xxxx with the filesystem type (eg ext3)) See man fstab for more info on the format of the entries.

You can now mount the drive using "mount /mnt/mydata" As written, it will also automatically mount on the next bootup.

Thanks for your quick respond.

The disk I wanted to use is "hdd".
Should I continue with the rest of the commends?

Output from "fdisk":

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20485785600 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2490 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 2490 19896502+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 6502 52227283+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdc2 6503 9052 20482875 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/hdd: 4310 MB, 4310433792 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 524 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 * 1 523 4200966 7 HPFS/NTFS
[root@localhost ~]#

Of course. You will be mounting /dev/hdd1 with filetype NTFS.