Hello again,

I have added another hard drive to my system. I first started out with a WD 80 gig and now have added a WD 250 Gig to the system for a storage drive.

I can tell that the system does indeed see that the hardrive is there by the listing in the /dev/disk/by-id directory because they are both listed there:

Here is my current Fstab file:

I am very new to linux so used the auto partioning options during the install, I have so many Hard Drive listings in my /dev folder that I don't know which one to use. Why do I have so many?

Here is my snippet of my hard drive listings in my /dev folder:

Can anybody walk me through this?

Thank you in Advance!

Have you partitioned the drive?
What type of filesystem did you choose?
Did you format it to the needed filesystem?
Have you created a mount point for it?

If this the second drive and has been partition to a single partition, type of filesystem on it, formated the drive, and created a mount point, then it should be /dev/hdb1 for the partition and mount to directory /storage.

fstab would look like this.
/dev/hdb1 /storage ext3 defaults 1 2

Brian1

For IDE drives:
/dev/hda - 1st IDE controller master
/dev/hdb - 1st IDE controller slave
/dev/hdc - 2nd IDE controller master
/dev/hdd - 2nd IDE controller slave
etc...

From the data you posted.
/dev/hda is your CDROM drive

/dev/hdb is your 80GB drive and where the OS was installed. It contains 2 partitions. One is the /boot partition where the kernel is located and other files necessary to boot. The 2nd is an LVM partition where / and swap are located.

/dev/hdc is the 250GB drive and contains one partition.

Typically non OS drives and removable media are mounted in /media but it doesn't matter. Create a directory to use as a mount point and add an entry in /etc/fstab.

Ok,

Well I created a folder in the media called "storage". I then added this line to my fstab:

When I try a "mount -a" in order to mount my fstab file I receive the following message:

So I thought O.K. maybe it is hdc1 instead of hdc so I modified the fstab accordingly and it does indeed mount, but there is already data in hdc1 and I have not used the hardrive yet. The mounted data looks very familiar to the boot partition? It also only has 98.7 MB, just like my /boot:

I must have partitioned this PC completely wrong or something, which I would not doubt with it being my first try at linux.

Anybody see what I might be messing up?

Thanks again!

Hmm interesting....
Is this a new drive? How did you partition and format it?
It does not look like /boot to me. /boot should not have etc, games, sbin or bin directories.

However, post the output of the command
fdisk -l (that is a small L) (You must be root to use the fdisk command)

Here is the output of a fdisk -l command:

Well that is really interesting.......... when mounted hdc1 only says that I have 98.7 MB of room on the partition and it is filled with the listing that I posted above, leaving me only with 88 MB of room even though it is a 250 GB drive. What had me even more stumped is why this drive even has data on it, it is BRAND new and was just put into the PC.

Thanks for the continual help, you guys are great and are making the Linux transition MUCH easier.

When using ext3 format you will lose about 5%. So out of a 250gb drive formatted as one partition as ext3 you will end up with about 235gb of storage. Same principle as if vfat but vfat does not eatup that much. This is what I would do. Run the following commands as root of coarse.
fdisk /dev/hdc
hit d and delete any and all partitions
hit n to create a new partition
hit t to select partition type and select the correct partition 1. Choose 83 as the type.
hit w to write and exit
/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdc1
mount like you want.

The 5% is reserved space for root and not really related to filesystem overhead i.e space required for formating. BTW the amount of reserved space can be modified using the tune2fs command.

Thanks for the info there michaelk. Didn't know I could gain back space since all that I needed it for was for backups and storage. I will check out tune2fs.

Brian1

Reserved space allows root to login in case the filesystem becomes full to perform maintenance tasks and it is also supposed to reduce fragmentation. For backups and storage you can reduce it to 1%.

This ended up making my machine unbootable, it appears that it made it HDC1 the drive that it would like to boot off of. But this is O.K. because I wanted to start fresh with a completely different storage setup. I now have my /boot and / on my small 80 gig which will serve as the drive that holds programs and OS material, then SWAP and /home will be on the 250 Gig. This will get the swap file onto a different IDE channel and a different hardrive to remove thrashing, not that it should happen anytime soon with 2 gigs of RAM.

How can I recover from something like this in the future?

I was also curious, when using SQUID during the initial setup is it only possible to mount space to the options available? (/, /boot, /home, /opt, ETC.) Is there not a way to assign it to something custom such as /storage? For now I just assigned the larger drive to /home because that is where I will be storing many of the large network logs anyways.