I dropped in a second sata hd and tried to boot. I get this boot message from iptables that asks me to look at "iptables-restore --help" and my GUI doesn't start. After booting, I can't type anything. I power down and unplug the second hd and it boots like a champ. Why would a second hd cause this? My intent is to format the second drive and use it for additional storage. This is on Fedora Core 5 btw.

If the harddrive contains an old install of linux it may be booting it, or mounting it as the root file system instead of your main drive. This can be caused by either a drive label conflict, or if you are using LVM.

I had the same problem you're describing and could never resolve it because I didn't understand LVM systems.

I re-partitioned my hard drive and did not use LVM or drive labels and this problem does not happen any more.

If any of these are possible, the easiest way I can think of is boot from a live-CD and then from there delete all the existing partitions on your new drive.

You are right. There was another linux install on that hd. Used a live-cd to fix that. Next, I had to edit grub to not use "root=LABLE/" and point grub to the correct partition. Now, I'm trying to automount the hd @ boot and I get the following error:

dmesg:
fstab:I would like to have the 2nd hd checked for errors because this will hold backup info. Ideas?