I am new to linux so please take it easy I am a GUI type, but i am slowly getting this command line, its been awhile since i anything like that.

Here is the problem i am having. I added a 40gb maxtor ata hard drive to my system. I am running ubuntu 8.10. The bios sees the drive, ubuntu shows it as a scsi drive. Its almost like its external(external drive icon) but its not. If i try and mount the drive it says it can't. Same if i try and access it. I have two of these small drives and the same goes for both. anyone have any ideas on what i need to do to get these drives to work?

Thanks!

open a terminal and run the commands:
and post the results here.

Also, what distro are you using?

Forrest

Note: this is assuming you're wanting to add and format a new drive -- don't follow the directions below if you're wanting to keep the data on that drive!

Have you initiated and formatted the drive?

If not, and since you're a GUI fan, not much out there can beat the functionality of Gparted.

go to your command-prompt and type:
once that's done and installed, type:
it should pop up a nice GUI for the program and you're in business. If you need to initiate the drive, it'll tell you, and then you can format to the correct filesystem (I'd recommend ext3 or reiserfs for Ubuntu 8.10 -- if you're going to use the drive for a lot of larger files, like movies, go for XFS instead).

The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, so you shouldn't have much trouble there.

From there all you have to do is mount it and/or set up your /etc/fstab -- there's a ton of information out there on how to do that, so I won't get into it here.

Hope that helps!

Ok, got it partitioned, formated and now it shows up and the drive space is accurate. But is shows up as a removable drive and i can't save anything to it.