I have trustix running on an old Dell GX1 and I would like to add another hard drive.

I have done this before on Windows, but I imagine that the process will be different in linux.

Thanks guys!

No it's not all that different.
1. Set the jumper so the new drive is a slave and the first one is the master drive.
2. Boot up into the bios and make sure your hard drives are there.
3. Boot into Linux and use a command line tool such as fdisk, cfdisk, parted or use the GUI tool called qtparted to create the partitions on the new drive.
4. If you used a command line tool to create the partitions, then you will need to format them also. If you used qtparted, format is included.
5. Make a directory in the mnt folder such as /mnt/stuff
6. Mount the new partition in the new folder. For example ....
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/stuff -t ext3
7. Put an entry in the /etc/fstab so your new partition will be available every time you reboot ....
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/stuff ext3 defaults 0 0
Note: if that is the last line in your fstab file, be sure to press enter to go to a new line so you don't get an error.

ok, now I have installed the new drive, but I have a really silly question...

How do I tell which hard drive I need to format?

It shows that there is a hda and a hdb.

I assumed that hda would be the original hard drive, but do I need to be sure?

I also only have shell, no GUI at all.

hda is *always* the primary master. you can rely on that 100%

and all the above instuctions are for a console. it's much easier than using a gui really.

if I have a directory called /data and I want to extend that directory with the new hardrive, how would I do that or is that possible?

that's not as nice... you'd need to look into either software raid or Logical Volume Management (LVM) there are howto's on both these subjects at tldp.org, but generally it's a substantial amount harder than it is to have a seperate mount point for it.

What do you mean by extend?

well I seen an article here that talked about (in point 0) that seemed to extend that directory.

I may be misunderstanding the meaning of this.

no, that just adds subdirectories to it. the data is still totally locked away within a particular directory, on a particular drive. if you have a certain volume of data that is always going to be very different from the other, then you could move that to the new partition, but it's not like it's all one big usable space, they will just appear close to each other within the filesystem. If that's posible... then sure go for that, but if it's logically inconsistent to split the data into two halves (/var/data and /var/more_data_that_didnt_fit_on_the_other_drive) then it's not really a nice way to go around it. mind you... it'll still work of course...

I think I understand what you are saying.

I can split the data with no problem.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

hate to bother you guys again, but should I use ext2 or ext3 filesystem? Above has ext3, but a lot of tutorials have ext2.

I use ext3 but that's mostly a personal preference type of thing.

Remember, you can put a symbolic link in your directory structure, pointing to the new drive... I've done so in my one user account, giving me access to my 2ndary hard drive for storage purposes. You just name the symbolic link whatever you want, and it will appear in konqueror (for example) as a folder with a little arrow hanging on it. Other file managers will also treat it just like a sub-folder...

use either ext3 or reiserfs, either will do you fine.

could I 'ctrl-c' to get out of the check for bad blocks in the mkfs?