I put in a new 80 GB hard drive in my redhat 9 machine, it's my secondary hard drive. The system boots fine and I can go to the gnome login screen but that's when things go crazy. When I log in I'm taken to a wierd blank screen with no text anywhere, a bunch of error messages with no text in them and most importantly, it's not gnome, it's the other one that has the bar at the top and has a human paw for the start menu button.

What went wrong? How can I fix it without reinstalling the whole thing?

Also, how can I format or mount this new hard drive?

You did not give enough info.

Did you put it on the same IDE cable with another drive?
Did you make one master and the other slave?

In order to use the drive it needs to be partitioned and formated.

Fdisk or cfdisk will partition it and put a file system on it for you.

If it is primary IDE master it is /dev/hda
primary IDE slave it is /dev/hdb
secondary master is /dev/hdc
secondary slave is /dev/hdd

Sata will be /dev/sr0 etc.

to mount it if it was the secondary IDE master for example
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc /mnt/drive2

If you want it mounted at every boot then make an entry in Lilo or grub. located at /etc/lilo.conf or /etc/grub.conf

I havn't done Red Hat, Fedora mounts drives automatically.

I don't know what windows mgr. that you are opening.

Thanks for the reply, I should've updated my post though. I took the cowards way out. Since I really didn't need that old 6GB hard drive, I simply took it out and put the new 80GB as primary master and installed RH again.

Just for the sake of information for yourself and others,
Primary Master = 6GB (old)
Secondary Master = 80GB (new)

I didn't fdisk it nor did I attempt to mount it. I simply hooked it up and booted thinking it would see it on the new hardware check point, but it didn't.