I put in a new harddrive and rearranged some of the plugs to be right (I think). Now how do I tell Linux that I did this? It still seems to think I have an old (smaller) HD and I can't seem to partition it in gparted.

Fedora Core 5

whats the output of 'fdisk -l'?
is the harddrive empty and not formatted? is it an IDE or SCSI disk? is it on the primary or secondary interface? is it set to the master or slave device?

General,

I'll assume you are talking about an ATA drive.

Check your BIOS setup and see if the new drive is recognized. If not, check the 'jumper' setup on the new hard drive for correct master/slave setting.

I use a qt_parted from a live CD called System Rescue v0.2.19 for my formatting/partitioning of new drives. Small program, easy to download and burn to disk.

If your BIOS recognizes the hard drive, the qt_parted program will also see the disk. Don't forget, the-out-of-box drives are all '0's' and need to have a partition table setup before you proceed to partition the drive.

Select the appropriate partition scheme i.e. ext2,ext3, reiser for you linux distrobution. Also create a swap partition.

The new drive space will get used up quicker than you think.

Marvinudy

dmesg is your friend. Open a shell and type it in and see if you see it. If you have a question about what you see in dmesg, you can always compare it to /etc/fstab.

And as mentioned prior, fdisk -l is very helpful. Even better really.