multiple hard drives

[alex]

Bruce wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I need help installing my 2nd and 3rd hard drives.   This is on a new 
> system and I have installed Ubuntu 6.06 Desktop for Athlon 64.  My 
> first hard drive formatted and accepted the operating system.  All 
> seems ok with it.
>
> The install didn't seem to give me an opportunity to format and mount 
> the 2nd and 3rd drives.  I can't say for sure that it wasn't there, 
> but if it was I missed it.
>
> With ls I found:
>  * /dev/hda (my system disk)
>  * /dev/hdb (/media/cdrom0 per /etc/fstab)
>  * /dev/hdc (my 2nd drive?)
>  * /dev/hdd (my 3rd drive?)
>
> Ubuntu 6.06 Desktop has the menu selection System --> Administration 
> --> Disks.  This saw /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd but stated that they do not 
> have known partitions.  So far this seems reasonable.
>
> I wasn't able to google an exact hit on setting up the extra hard 
> drives under Ubuntu, but fdisk did come up a lot.  Thus sudo fdisk   
> /dev/hdc allowed me to set up a partition.  The partition showed up as 
> /dev/hdc3.  I'm new to the internals of Linux, but having the 
> partitionless disk and the partitioned disk both show up in /dev with 
> similar names seemed a little odd.
>
> So far I seem to be making progress (as far as I know).  Now here is 
> the problem.  Disk Manager lets me set an "access path" ( I assume 
> that this is a "mount point").  Disk Manager also has a format 
> button.  Clicking on format causes a progress bar to post with the 
> initial display being about half done.  The display sits there for a 
> couple of minutes without the progress bar being updated.  Then the 
> progress bar goes away and I assume that the format is done.  At this 
> point Disk Manager lists the free space as "232.88 GB (Free space not 
> available)".  I was hoping after spending all this time and money that 
> the free space would be available.
>
> To /etc/fstab I added:
> /dev/hdc3   /mnt/hdc3   ext3   defaults,errors=remount-ro   0  (copied 
> from another entry)
>
> The situtation is even more confusing for me.  If I do a cd /mnt/hdc3 
> and do a sudo nano x.txt I am able to write to /mnt/hdc3/x.txt.
>
> Disk Manager still states that the free space is not available.  Yes, 
> I tried changing the ownership of /dev/hdc3 to the same user that was 
> invoking disk manager (shouldn't be necessary since Disk Manager asked 
> for a root password).
>
> Thus, my questions are:
>
> 1)  Is my approach good or am I off in left field?
>
> 2) Any suggestions and/or corrections?
>
> 3) Is my x.txt actually going to my 1st hard drive or my 2nd hard drive?
>
> 4) Is it correct to have /dev/hdc and /dev/hdc3 in the same directory 
> correct?
>
> 5) As far as I know my extra drives will mount under root and appear 
> similar to /dev/hdc3.  If I do a df or du at root will I see one drive 
> or both?
>
> 6) Is there a good tutorial out there on using multiple hard drives on 
> a single system?
>
> 7) How do I mount or export the drives so other machines on the 
> network can see them?
>
> Thank you,
> Bruce
>
>
>
>
>
I highly recommend  the free partition manager by Ranish .  Just google 
search for Ranish.
Use f5 to select the hard drives.