Installing a new hard drive

[Shango Oluwa]

On Sat, 2004-12-18 at 15:14 +0000, Eamonn Sullivan wrote:
> This should be simple, but in all my years of using Linux I've never
> done it. Now that I've mastered rsync for backing up the PCs in my
> house, I decided to add a new SATA 160GB drive to the Ubuntu system to
> store my backups. I've done that, and the drive is visible in the
> device manager, but how do I format it (ext3) and attach it to the
> file system? Was thinking of putting it in /home/backup or /backup.
> Can someone give me a quick pointer to the right commands? 'apropos
> disk' and 'apropos format' return a somewhat overwhelming number of
> entries...
> 

To formatthe disk use 'fdisk' or (even better) cfdisk... you can install
cfdisk via synaptic - it gives you a clear visual display of what your
disk partitions look like.

You will have to know what device the drive is attached to,
i.e. /dev/sda or /dev/hdc (or whatever). Once you have ascertained this,
execute:

cfdisk /dev/xxx			(where xxx is the device descriptor)

Now you should see the cfdisk GUI and it will show an empty, unformatted
disk drive. Use the command menu to create new partitions. Be sure to
'Write' them to the disk before quitting. Also make some hand-written
notes of the partition info, e.g.: /dev/sda1 = 10,000 MB, 
/dev/sda2 = ... etc.

Once you have created a partition/s you must then use the following
command to format them (one at a time) as ext3 filesystems:

mkfs -j /dev/sda1		(substitute sda1 with your own entries)

... and that is it! Now you mount the partition to /home/backup
or /mnt/backup or whatever, e.g.: 

mount -t ext3 -o defaults /dev/xxx1 /mnt/backup

I hope this is helpful, because I have never dealt with SATA drives
before, but I cannot see why it should differ from IDE or SCSI once the
device manager has recognised the drive...

Regards,
Shango