Installing a new hard disk

[Jeffrey S Fineberg]

Just an interesting note...I had a disk that was (luckily) failing
intermittantly.  This disk had both Windows and Redhat Linux in 2
different partitions.  I purchased a replacement disk and used Norton
Ghost to copy both the FAT and Unix partitions, with the option to expand
the partitions as part of the copy.  This saved me an incredible amount of
time.

Jeff Fineberg


On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Asheville Joe wrote:

>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]#
>
>
>