Simple question.
I installed fedora core 4 on a hard drive with HDA designator. Since then, I bought a slightly larger HD and installed fedora 8 on it. When I make the larger hd primary and the smaller hd secondary via the pc ribbon cable, fedora 8 doesn't recognize the smaller hd and I suspect it's because both were originally installed as HDA at different times. So, how do I modify the smaller hd to become HDB?
All I really want to do, is mount the smaller hd so I can copy files between the hard drives.
Thanks much folks!!

AIUI, the linux kernel determines which drive is which based on the bus location, bus 0 master is hda, bus 0 slave is hdb, bus 1 master is hdc, etc. But the location of the files in the tree depends on where the partitions are mounted, and that's determined by the /etc/fstab file.

Are you saying that the drive is now completely unavailable? Or does it just not boot up correctly or something? Try running 'cat /proc/partitions' to see what block devices your kernel is actually seeing.

I suspect this is probably a (hardware) jumper issue on the drives themselves. If either/both is specifically jumpered for master/slave, moving them around like that isn't going to work as you want.
Make them both "cable select" - and use a new "80" ribbon cable, not the old grey "40" cable.

This morning I noticed a partition (/boot) on my smaller hd was visible under 'computer'. When I mounted the volume, I actually have visibility into the /boot partition of my second hd.

Cat /proc/partitions provides (in part)
major minor #blocks name
8 0 9999864 sda
8 1 200781 sda1
8 2 9791017 sda2
8 16 4210920 sdb
8 17 104391 sdb1
8 18 4104607 sdb2
........
So AIUI is seeing a sda, and sdb. Trick is to mount more than just a partition from the second hd.

two options that I'm working on are
a) in menu.lst add
map (hd0) (hda)
map (hd1) (hdb)
b) in fstab
change
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
to
LABEL=Storage /mydata ext3 defaults 1 2

Any suggestions, direction, greatly appreciated

Well, option a was a flop.
Any suggestions of how to progress, David?

every filesystem in linux has a mount point, which is a directory, usually in /mnt or /media, although sometimes it is a directory right off the root. The boot drive has the root file system, and the other drive needs to be mounted somewhere. In a twisted sort of way you are correct that since both were /dev/hda at one time, it's messing things up. But it's messings things up because you need to edit /etc/fstab, and put in the correct settings when you swap the hard drives.

Say you have

/dev/hdb1 /data ext3 defaults 0 0

in /etc/fstab, but there is no /data directory in /. You need to make that directory, and mount the file system:

mkdir /data
mount /data