Mounting and using 2nd hard disk

daveturnbull · 11-30-2007, 05:28 AM

Hi,

I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to Linux and hardware configs - my job as a web developer only requires basic server maintenance through webmin.

I have a Dell PE server with 2 HDD's. RHEL4 ES is installed and working on the 1st disk but I'm a bit stumped as to how to mount and use the 2nd HDD.

From reading other posts on here I realise I need to provide a bit more info about the setup...

/etc/fstab

Code:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/VolGroup_ID_15986/LogVol1 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/VolGroup_ID_15986/LogVol2 /tmp                    ext3    defaults        1 2
/dev/VolGroup_ID_15986/LogVol5 /usr                    ext3    defaults        1 2
/dev/VolGroup_ID_15986/LogVol4 /var                    ext3    defaults        1 2

/sbin/fdisk -l

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           5       40131   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2               6        5062    40620352+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3   *        5063        5075      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            5076       30394   203374867+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5            5076       30394   203374836   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       30394   244139773+   5  Extended

I would like to mount the whole of /dev/sdb1 on /var/warehouse (It's intended use is as an archive library)

All the VolGroup uglyness was added by the Dell OpenManage software I had to use to install the OS as it didn't recognise any of the HDD's when I tried to install directly from the RHEL CD's!

Any help gratefully accepted.

Thanks,

Dave

jschiwal · 11-30-2007, 05:41 AM

The type of partition is "5", extended. I wonder if this ID type is being reused, because it is the partition type that MSDOS 3.3+ used.

Aside from the ID being odd, it shouldn't be an extended partition at all. It should be a primary Linux partition. If you aren't going to add other disks for archiving you could use gparted to repartition the drive and format it. "sudo /usr/sbin/gparted /dev/sdb". Or you can use "sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdb" to delete the present partitioning and repartition it. Then use a program like "sudo /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1" to create a filesystem on it.

Fedora Core & Red Hat use LVM volumes by default. There is a gui program to manage LVM volumes: system-config-lvm.