I've been away for a couple of weeks and since I had such a difficult time trying to get Debian to recognize or mount a second HDD, which it would never do no matter what instructions I followed, after the initial installation I decided to just reinstall Debian Sarge from scratch.

But, during the install Debian only allowed me to clean the SCSI HDD for its use and wouldn't let me do anything with the second IDE HDD. Instead Debian insisted on a Dual Boot installation with GRUB.

I do not want a Dual Boot system, so now I am trying to find out how to have Debian repartition the second drive so it can be used by Debian.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Ande

Does the system see the second drive? If it does you can partition it with fdisk /dev/hdX (where X is your disk's ID), then just mkfs on it and add it to fstab.

You can put your another harddrive to use like this (in this example first HD is /dev/sda, second /dev/hda). You'll have to do all of this as root.

1) Optional: Install "cfdisk" and/or "qtparted" (last one works in XWindows only)

2) Run "cfdisk /dev/hda", "fdisk /dev/hda" or run "qtparted" and choose "hda"

3) Erase all existing partitions

4) Create a new partition(s), make sure it's partition type is "Linux", pay attention to the partition number(s)

5) Commit changes (write partition table to disk)

6) Run mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 (or several times, once for each partition number)

7) Add a mountpoint for your new partition, for example "mkdir /newpartition"

8) Add an entry to /etc/fstab. Basically simple copy-pasting, but check "man 5 fstab" to be sure

9) Try mounting the partition with "mount /newpartition" or "mount /dev/hda1"


If that does not work then nothing will

Thanks for the info.

But, how do I get the Debian to install without the Dual Boot GRUB? I do not want a dual boot system. I will only be using Linux on this machine.
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I figured out that I had to boot with a Windows 98 floppy and use Microsofts FDISK to remove all hard Drive partitions.

Something Linux would not allow me to do. So, I guess I'll keep the Microsoft utilities handy for little work-arounds like this.

And I thought Linux made things easier without having to use Microsoft software.