How do I get new IDE drive partitioned
 

Hi,

I'm new to this forum and Linux. I successfully installed RedHat 9 on a PC133 with 64M RAM and 2G drive. This gives no graphical interface, just shell. I added a new 40Gig Western Digital IDE drive today. Need to get Linux to recognize the drive. How do I get that nice disk druid back to partition it? Or should I do it some other way. fdisk is scary - ouch. Then I plan to install the applications that I couldn't load on the first hard drive.

TIA,

Dave

That's kind of a tough question.

I think this has been raised before, but I am not sure if disk druid can be used independant of the installer. It is a moot point anyway, as you mentioned you do not have X installed. You will have to use fdisk, it isn't really that difficult. Another option is the (slightly) more user friendly cfdisk.

Another thing you have to keep in mind is that you can not arbitrarily start installing software on the new harddrive, as Linux expects certain things to be in certain directories.

If you have your entire system on one partition now (the 2G) then you will want to move a couple of directories to the new drive. /usr is a good one, because that is where the bulk of your software is installed. /home is another good choice. To do this you need to create the partitions on your new HD, create filesystems on them, cp your current /usr directory onto the new partition, then update /etc/fstab to point to it.

As far as linux recognizing the drive, just install it and boot. depending on the ide channel it is on it will be referred to as /dev/hd{b,c,d}

This is crap windows advice I know, but if you are just starting out with linux it may be easier for you to just reinstall after installing your new HD. Then you can use disk druid to spread linux over your 2 hd's as you please.

Doing it manually will certainly not be easy for a beginner, but if you really want to go this route I can walk you through it...

OK, How would I reinstall from scratch?
Swap the hard disk master and slave jumpers and boot form the boot-floppy?
Other suggestion?

Do you not still have the install CDs?

Yes, I have the install CDs.

But it knows that I have installed RH9 and doesn't care about me any more. How do I tell it to reinstall.

First things first, back up any important files you may have, if you have none, fine.

Second: physically install your new HD.

Third: just put disk 1 in your cdrom and reboot. When you get to it, choose manually partition with disk druid. Erase all current partitions. Create new ones, and make sure they are spread over your two disks.

My suggestion: Put / (ie: the root filesystem) on /dev/hda (your 2G HD) and put /usr and /home and your swap partition on the new HD.

When you say "install the new HD" I assume you mean to remove the old one. I will try that.
THis morning I already installed the new one in addition to the old one (old one as master, new one as slave both on primary IDE controller), but I will disconnect the old one (with RH9) and set the new one as "single".
Thanks for your help - o/of to watch a movie now.

Well, there's no reason not to use both is there?

Anyway, good luck and let us know how you did...