My linux computer would no longer boot, so I bought a new hard drive and installed from scratch. (RedHat 9.0)

Now I want to add my old drive as my 2nd hard drive and see if I can copy some NEEDED files off of it.

My BIOS sees the new drive.

fdisk -l shows the drive as /dev/hdb

the "drive" I need is
/dev/hdb5 (a "linux" file type)

what do I do.

I added to /etc/mtab the follow line
/dev/hdb5 / ext2 rw 0 0

then it let me mount it
mount /dev/hdb5

now how do I see it? or am completly wrong?

thanks

- kurt
(programmer playing with hardware)

Never, never, never edit /etc/mtab directly. That file is used by the OS to keep track of what is mounted at the time. Doing so can cause major damage. The file you want to edit is /etc/fstab. "mount" and "umount" use this file to know when, where and how to mount your partitions.

You should make an a directory for the old disk to mount to, e.g. /mnt/old_disk, and make the appropriate entry in /etc/fstab:
Mount it readonly at first just in case. You might think about running e2fsck on it too. Check the man pages info on that.

never edit the mtab file ugh. Is that why i just spend the day reinstalling?

I'm still confused on what to do.

my 2nd drive is seen as /hdb but you said to mount /hda5

Right, substitute for /dev/hda5 in the instructions above with whatever the drive has become. Try running

# fdisk -l /dev/hdb

That will give you a list of all the partitions.