OK, first of all, I'm a relative newbie. It took me about 4 evenings to install and set everything up, including a struggle to configure a winmodem, and configure an ISA sound card. Well, that is all done (gave up on the winmodem and used a hardware modem on COM1), but now I have another issue.

I have 2 hard drives, both 1.9 Gig. I loaded linux onto the first hard drive, and formatted it, as Linux is the only OS that I am running. I did a custom install, to keep space usage down a bit, as I didn't need all of the software offered.

Now - here's the thing:

If I go into OTHER>PACKAGES>INSTALL SOFTWARE under KDE it only shows about 300 Meg available disk space. It seems that the second hard drive is not being counted.

I went into DiskDrake, and the second hard drive is there, and I have formatted it. It has 3 partitions, including 100Meg swap file. It seems that the partitions are not mounted, and there is no "mount" available in the menu.

Do I need to set a mount point on this disk for the OS to see the available space? If I click on the "set mount point" option, it suggests /var. Is this a valid/good choice? Should I also set a mount point on the second partition? Also, should I select the option to 'move the files to new partition' or 'hide'?

So, my general question is this: Does each partition need to have a mount point, and be mounted, in order for linux to see the available space?

And lastly: Will DiskDrake make the proper adjustments so that the OS knows where these mount points are located for the next restart?

Thanks for your kind assistance,

Scott

Yes you need to step up a mount point for each partition and mount it to allow the OS to "see" it.
If you want to use the new partition to hold the system (or part of it) a good option is to mount it under /usr (as many programs get installed into it).
Another good ideia is to choose a separate partition to hold your home (thus mounting it under /home) because your personal data and a great amount of personal config files are stored there, allowing you to safelly upgrade your whole system and even installing a new linux distro without touching that data.

In the above options you should move the data to the new mounted partitions so that you can free that space in your root (/) partition.

As a side note remember to do a backup of you important date because we never know when somethings goes wrong ..

Hope that helps

Thank you very much. Am I correct in assuming that DiskDrake will make any necessary mods to fstab (I thinks that's what the file is called)?

I did set up mount points earlier. but chose the 'hide' option, and then the system could not boot. I received a slew of "can't touch file:/usr/....." I then had to do a reinstall to get things working again. I guess I should have moved them to the new partition instead.(?)

Thanks,

Scott

Yes DiskDrake saves the mods to /etc/fstab .


The system couldn't boot 'cause you've choosen to hide the files and so it cannot find the /usr dir (thus the "can't touch file /usr" message ).
Now if you choose to move it it will be (as the name said) moved to the new partition freeing up the respectiv space in the old partition.