A.P. Lawrence

Adding a Linux Hard Drive by Dirk Hart

I was asked to configure a second IDE hard drive for a RedHat 7 Linux system.

I was at a loss as to how to describe this new drive to Linux and after half an hour I realized that the drive had been autodetected at the time of the last boot. A little research showed how IDE drives are named:

• Primary Controller First Drive: /dev/hda
• Primary Controller Second Drive: /dev/hdb
• Secondary Controller First Drive: /dev/hdc
• Secondary Controller Second Drive: /dev/hdd

Then fdisk was used to partition the drive: fdisk /dev/hdc. I seleted the old partitions and added a single linux partition, making sure the partition type was 83 (Linux).

When that was done I used mkfs to make a filesystem. Since there was just one partition it was named /dev/hdc1: mkfs /dev/hdc1.

I made a mount point: mkdir /usr0 and mounted the new filesystem: mount /dev/hdc1 /usr0. The filesystem can be unmounted using umount /usr0.

Lastly, I made an entry in /etc/fstab describing the new filesystem so it would be mounted automatically mounted at boot time. This was tested using mount all and observing that the new filesystem was indeed mounted.

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Comments /Linux/adddrive.html
LinuxAdddrive :

You rock Dirk Hart!

---September 7, 2004



Fri Feb 25 00:49:46 2005: Subject: Works Perfectly   TommyTom
Worked perfectly! Thanx!



(1 complete *nix n00b down, a couple million to go....)

Mon Sep 12 01:08:18 2005: Subject: Just what I was looking for... thanks   Phil
for newbies like me, the fstab I added looked like this:


/dev/hdc1 /data ext2 defaults 1 1

/data is the mount directory I created. This is where I want the hd to be mounted. The filesystem type was ext2, not ext3 like my other hds which caused me a little headache until I learned to use mount -l to list the filesystem types. You can use mount -l after mounting manually the new hd to the /data directory to see which type you should list in your fstab file. Hope this helps

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