Hi guys any help i can get with this Question would be much appreciated.

I have recently changed distro's from Red Hat 9 to Debian.
while using red hat i bought a new 120gig Hardrive and needed it for backing up dvd's that i produce for clients.
Now Im fairly new to linux but i did the necessary research and got the second HD up and running, now when i changed distro's to Debian all i did was edit my fstab and mount the second HD to a directory i created and everything "seemed" to work fine.
Now I was using the hardrive to download packages i needed and apps etc... And this worked fine. Then once i setup samba and checked the size of the remote Hardrive (linked to the 120gig HD on linux) I have on my Windows computer, I noticed that the size and free space of this drive was not being displayed as it used to be on when i had setup the same things on Red-Hat.

I took no notice of this until i installed video-dvdrip for debian and when i tried to rip a dvd i noticed it had in the bottom space meter
0mb space on Hardrive
this was unusual as it was correctly linked to my 120gig HD and when i used this app on Red-Hat it worked fine and showed correct amount of free space.
I can still download things to the hardrive and what not but i can't with dvdrip which is the most important app i use as, when i try to it puts up a flag saying cannot proceed 0 mb space on HD. But this is incorrect there is planty of space on the HD it is nowhere near full and has at least 60gig free, i typed
df -h and got this output:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 -2387040283165k 1.0k 0.0k 11% /
/dev/hda1 -8113220825k 1.0k 0.0k 13% /boot
/dev/hdb1 -30211860042933k 1.0k 0.0k 58% /home/HD120

I thought it looked a bit wierd too... I typed df -ik and got:

Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 1158720 49408 1109312 5% /
/dev/hda1 2000 23 1977 2% /boot
/dev/hdb1 14663680 3789 14659891 1% /home/HD120

i wasn't sure wat this meant but anyway Hopefully all the information you linux wiz'z need to solve this is here I REALLY REALLY NEED TO GET THIS WORKING As i need dvdrip for work and although i can still use the HD and install things i can't do the main thing i need and that is backup dvd's and transcode video data with dvdrip. Thanks in advance hope you can help.

i'll give it a shot for you.

what it looks like is the other hd is mounted through your /home. sometimes this can cause problems with apps. they think that your /120 is in your actual /home. thus your 120 is bigger than your /home and it is full. does that make sense?

remedy. change your fstab to mount that disk as it's own name. that is /120 instead of /home/120. to do this, su, passwd, cd, mkdir /120, vim /etc/fstab, and change where it's mounted, chown -R patskeatske /120. give it a reboot, since, i'm not positive on this, debian doesn't have an update-fstab. actally i don't think that any of them do.

then i would update your app to burn/rip to that partition, hd, and you should be set.

cheers.

Hey i gave your idea a shot but to no avail

same thing as before and same msg's when df -h as before. nothing changed.
Im really stumped on this i don't know what the problem could be at all.

Could it be drivers? I am running a 2.2.20 kernel the woody stable thingy although it aint woody anymore since i had to update a few apps to get some programs of mine working like dvdrip.

should i upgrade my kernel to something newer, since 2.2.20 is fairly old

i wouldn't think that the kernel has anything to do with this. i would update to atleast the 2.4 if i was you.

for some reason now i'm really not thinking that your fstab is the problem. you stated before that you have a bunch of stuff on that disk? what is the fs that is on it? if it's reisersfs and you don't have the module loaded in your kernel than that would be a problem. i don't think that 2.2 supports reisersfs. if it's ext3 than you might not have the module loaded and it's not able to read the journal of the disk.

upgrade you kernel, make sure that you know what fs the 120 is, cfdisk /dev/hdb1, take a look at it, and then exit. it won't right anything unless you tell it to, so don't. then i would take a look at the fstab once more to make sure that you have the proper fs in there for that disk.

when i type cfdisk /dev/hdb1 i get a msg saying

No Partition table or unknown signature on partition table
Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ?

I say no because i don't want to lose anything on this disk even though i don't really know what the question is asking.

when i type fdisk /dev/hdb1 i get
Device contains nether a valid Dos partition table no SUn or OSF disk label etc ....

I am quite certain that the filesystem on the disk is ext3 though,.
I used fdisk in Red-Hat 9 to format the disk i used the

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Lin...HardDrive.html

I just noticed that in my fstab i have been accidently (stupidly) mounting the hardrive as ext2 But it is actually ext3 i just changed it and now in the boot up msg's it give me the error that ext3 fs is not supported by kernel, so that goes back to what you said. How would i go about adding the ext3 module or would a complete upgrade of the kernel be a wiser choice than just adding the new module.
so now i cannot see the HD at all and im guessing this was the prob all along.

upgrade your kernel.

apt-cache search kernel
apt-get install kernel....

use the 2.4, it's more stable and if your not having any problems with any of your apps or hardware besides the fs, then just go with the newest kernel in 2.4.

cheers.

Thanks heaps for you help emetib.

I tried grabbing the 2.6.5 kernel using this tutorial

Its the very verbose tutorial on compiling your debian kernel by osnews..
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2949&page=1

I ended up getting a few errors [_modinst_post] Error 1
leaving ...
[real_stamp_image] Error 2
leaving ...

so yeah i dunno why this is but im guessing it's becuase im an absolute tool/newbie when it comes to the make config thing... i had a real hard time figuring out whether i needed a lot of things.

Ill probably try your idea and grab the 2.4 kernel but if it is that i can't work out the make xconfig then im probably screwed lol.
Thanks heaps for all your help anyway