Hi,

Question 1...

I installed a 2nd hard drive on my Slackware box, it shows up in the BIOS during boot, and shows up if I do LSDEV, but does not show up in CFDISK. It was previously a 200gig "slave" drive for a Win2k box formatted with NTFS, what do I need to do to make it show up?


Question 2...

I do not care what is currently on the drive and would like to reformat it as Linux, once I get this drive to work I want to put in a 3rd drive then RAID the two together through a Promise 100meg ATA IDE card into a 400gig drive. This worked perfectly fine through this card on a Win2k pro box with two 200gig drives, I assume this is doable in Slackware, anyone know how?

So, that's just an ATA drive right ? Try just fdisk if cfdisk won't see it. What kernel are you booting BTW ?

cfdisk assumes you want to access /dev/hda. To use cfdisk to access other drives, just specify them

try "fdisk -l".

Thanks (all three of you) for replying...

Kernel = v 2.4.31 (Slackware 10.2)

CFDISK /DEV/HDC/ brought it up in CFDISK and is displaying as the full 200gig drive.

FDISK -l (lowercase L) brought up all this:

===============================================================
root@linuxserver:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hdc: 203.9 GB, 203928109056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 1 24792 199141708+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hda: 13.5 GB, 13578485760 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1650 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1528 12273628+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 1529 1650 979965 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1529 1650 979933+ 82 Linux swap
root@linuxserver:~#
===============================================================

How do I format this drive and make it auto-mount when the PC boots up?

If cfdisk sees it, use it to delete the old partitions, and make new ones to suit your needs. At least one root partition and one swap. The root partition should be of a regular linux firesystem, like ext3, XFS, JFS, reiserfs. The swap should be of type linux swap. You can also make a home partiton similar to the root partition, but for your stuff.

Try the slackbook in my sig. Also try shilo's site.

all you need is:
$man fstab
#vi /etc/fstab

Thanks for the replies...

Turns out the 200gig drive I was trying to use was bad, CFDISK kept giving "A fatal error has occurred", FDISK would work with it but I'm not sure why.

It also kept displaying an error about something being busy or in use when I tried to mount it, MKFS did not work either. Win2k had initially had a problem with a humongous amount of bad sectors which I thought I had under control, but it was a used drive someone gave me, guess now I know why.

Drive was yanked, a spare 80gig was installed, MKFS worked on the first try using EXT2 as a file system, gave it a mount point and stuck it in FSTAB, rebooted, drive mounts itself, but is coming up as 69.x gigs free space which is more space that I really wanted to loose, Windows isn't even that bad, is there another way to format it without loosing so much space?

I don't know which file system formatting gives you most free space (I believe you can easily find such info on the net), but you can really try ext3 or reiserfs.