I've just loaded Vector Linux on my computer (it's a Pentium 4/2ghz my father-in-law gave us). It seems to be working well, however, I have a second hard drive in addition to the boot drive. I can't seem to locate it anywhere using the gui. However, I checked the system settings window under "storage" and the drive shows up. It doesn't show up in the "devices" area of the system tray. I don't think I can navigate to the drive using the "file system" window either.
Is there something I can do to -- one, find the drive; and two, add the drive to the devices window so I can mount it when I need to (or, preferably, keep it permantly mounted -- like on a mac or windows computer)?
By the way, the jumper on the extra drive is set for "slave" so I wouldn't think that's the problem.
Thanks.

Open a terminal, enter "su" to become root, and then edit the /etc/fstab file to add the other drive. To see how the system sees (all) drives, do "fdisk -l".

Do "man fstab" for details, or simply post your exisiting fstab + fdisk -l here.

Thanks for the reply!
I'm not a power user so I'm a little familiar with some of what you're saying, not everything.
Where do I come across the "/etc/fstab file" and how do I edit it? What will "man fstab" tell me?

Thanks.

There may be some tools for this in the GUI, but I am not familiar with Vector. I strongly recommend getting familiar with a few basics in the terminal (command line).

"man fstab" gives you the manual page for the fstab file---it describes the details of the file format.

To edit (any) file in a terminal, simply enter the name of an editor, followed by the file name. For config files, you typically need to be the root user. (enter "su", and the root password.)

So, to edit fstab, enter "nano /etc/fstab". If you don't like nano, or it's not on your system, then substitute whatever you have--eg gedit, kedit, kate, krite, etc.

You can READ config files in the the GUI by just double-clicking on them.

Look at the drives with "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l". If you see partitions, you can enter "sudo /sbin/file -s /dev/sdb1" for the second drive, first partition. It will tell you if there is a partition on it. If this is a new drive, there won't be.

If this is a new drive, it hasn't been partitioned yet. A drive needs at least one partition and the partitions need filesystems on them (formatted). Your distro may have a graphical disk partitioning tool that will allow you to partition & format the drive easily. It will probably let you enter the mount point to mount it on and then create an /etc/fstab entry so that it is mounted when you boot up. Use a linux native filesystem. After it is mounted you may want to use "chown" and "chmod" on the (mounted partition) mount point to enable you the permissions you need.

Thanks all, I'll try those things. By the way the drive is a previously used Mandriva drive. It was the boot drive for the previous computer, but now it's jumpered to slave.

Menu -> System -> Vector Control Center -> Filesystem -> Mount Partitions