Installing a new hard disk

[Asheville Joe]

Hi.  Linux 101 question:

I bought a new hard drive (for use with my new - not purchased yet - 
computer).

I have two hard drives in my current computer, the main one (dual boot 
Linux and WIN98), and one in a removable bay.

I have the removable one (hdb1) set as noauto in fstab.

So, I shut down my computer, pulled the old removable drive out and put 
the new one in thinking it would boot up fine and let me figure out how 
to format the new drive to ext3.

Oh well!  Mandrake (9.1 RC2) sees the new drive, can't read it and gets 
upset.  It will only boot into maintenance mode and I don't know enough 
to proceed.  That wasn't too bad, but I thought that having it set to 
noauto would have gotten me around this.

So, I shutdown and removed the new drive then rebooted.  It still won't 
let me past maintenance mode because it's missing it's beloved drive.

Questions:
 1) How do I set up my computer so that it is happy whether or not hdb1 
is there?

 2) How do I put the new drive in and format it (mkfs.ext3?)?  It's a 
120GB IDE drive that I will probably use for media files and image 
backups of the main drive on my new system when I get it.  (It will be 
installed in the new computer - so Bob, don't yell at me for putting 
more stuff in this old clunker. ;))

3) If I want to rename my drives - e.g. from dos_hda1 to cdrive_hda1, 
etc., do I have to do anything other than change the entries in 
/etc/fstab?  Is there anything to watch out for?

Thanks.

Joe

My /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda7 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda6 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda9 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount 
dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codep
age=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/dos_hda1 vfat 
iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0,defaults 0
 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/dos_hda5 vfat 
iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0,defaults 0
 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount 
dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,cod
epage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/removeable ext3 user,noauto,rw,suid,exec 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 swap swap defaults 0 0

I shut down, put my old drive back in and it works as advertized.

[root at localhost mnt]# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/removeable
[root at localhost mnt]# cd removeable
[root at localhost removeable]# ls
[root at localhost removeable]# df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda7             5.9G  2.4G  3.2G  43% /
/dev/hda6              16M  2.4M   13M  17% /boot
/dev/hda9              15G  328M   15G   3% /home
/dev/hda1             3.5G  2.3G  1.2G  66% /mnt/dos_hda1
/dev/hda5             3.4G  876M  2.5G  26% /mnt/dos_hda5
/dev/hdb1             4.0G   33M  3.7G   1% /mnt/removeable

[root at localhost removeable]# cd ..
[root at localhost mnt]# umount /dev/hdb1
[root at localhost mnt]#