Hi all,
I am working in the following environment. Red Hat Linux 8.0, kernel 2.4.18-14 with Intel 810E chipset. I am having 2 hard disks. In the first hard disk I had installed the OS and the second is empty. Say suppose I am downloading a file. I want to save the file in the empty hard disk rather than the hard disk which contain the OS. How to do this ? How to configure the empty hard disk from the hard disk which contains the OS ?

With Regards,
S.Suriya Mohan.

FIrst you'll need to set up its info.

You could use parted or other partitioning software to create its table. (List what partitions it has and of what type.)

Then format it with the correct filesystem.

Then mount it.
mkdir /mnt/newdisk
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdxx

Where xx is the partition your trying to mount. (I.e. if its one partition on the whole disk and its the slave on the primary IDE then its hdb1)

'mkreiserfs' (or the fs of your choice) and then 'mkdir' and mount the drive/partition. Edit fstab to make it permanent.

cfdisk /dev/hdX (the blank disk)
create a partition
then do this:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdX1
or
mkreiserfs /dev/hdX1

then you can moutn it like:
mount /dev/hdX1 /mnt/hd
then /mnt/hd is where it is until you umount /dev/hdX1 or reboot.

Hi all,
Suggest me how to do hardware conncetions between the hard disk with OS and the empty hard disk. One hard disk is connected to the primary and the other to the secondary of the motherboard with 2 separate IDE cables. The output of df command is as follows.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdc8 18888420 4121624 13807316 23% /
/dev/hdc7 101089 17272 78598 19% /boot
none 62816 0 62816 0% /dev/shm

How to address the blank hard disk ? like /dev/hdX.
How to create partition ?
Can I use one IDE cable to connect 2 hard disks ? How to make the hardware connection in such a way that the hard disk with OS recognise the empty hard disk ?

With Regards,
S.Suriya Mohan.

Definitely, you can use the same cable, as long as it's got two connectors. I'd recommend that over two separate ones. It would be hdd, assuming an IDE drive, whereas now it'd maybe be hda or hdb. Put it on the middle of the cable, with the primary on the end. Then, on the back of the drive there are jumpers you're going to need to set - master as master and slave as slave. If you have problems after that, maybe poke around in the BIOS. If this is an unformatted disk, it should be brand new - aren't there manufacturers instructions?

Sorry for screwing it up and leaving out a somewhat important step but everybody else addressed your second question, though I prefer fdisk - '(c)fdisk /dev/hdd'.