[Pc_Support] Re: LUNA: Adding 400 GB HDD to SuSE 9.2 system ....

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 09:05 -0600, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> .... I am preparing to add a 400 GB Samsung HDD to my 2.4 GHz P4, 
> running SuSE 9.2, all stock. I already have a 160 GB Samsung, mounted as 
> /home, which I installed a couple of years ago. I am a bit fuzzy on the 
> process of making a filesystem on that drive :-). The last time (on the 
> 160 GB drive), I called mkreiserfs (8) on the whole drive, /dev/hdb, not 
> a partition (/dev/hdb1), since I was using the whole drive & didn't 
> divide it into partitions :-). I have had intermittent reliability 
> problems w/ that drive ever since, more of them recently. I also have 
> the same situation on this machine (933 MHz PIII, SuSE 8.2, all stock, 
> 20 GB second drive mounted as /home, but addressed as /dev/hdb1 even 
> though that partition is in fact the whole drive), w/ absolutely *NO* 
> reliability/stability issues. Would someone refresh me on the steps to 
> get this drive (the 400 GB) up & going :-) ? TIA

Use "fdisk" or "parted" to slice (partition) the drive.
You can then use format individual slices with filesystems.

E.g., "mke2fs -J /dev/hdc1" to format the first slice with Ext3.

- Insider track ...

There are disk labels (partition tables) and disk slices (partitions).
Inside of each slice you can have another disk label.

The legacy PC BIOS/DOS disk label (aka "Basic Disc" in NT5+/2000+
terminology) only allows 4 slices (primary partitions).  Linux
enumerates those slices as "1-4".

Latter DOS versions (which mean all current Windows versions) allow you
to put another disk label (an extended partition) in one slice (one
primary partition) so you can have more slices (logical partitions).
Linux enumerates those slices as "5+".

The new Logical Disk Manager (LDM) disk label (aka "Dynamic Disc" in NT5
+/2000+ terminology) now sets up 1 slice (one primary partition) as this
format.  I wouldn't recommend it for Linux because while the kernel
supports LDM and can read slices/filesystems in it, most Linux support
tools (including fdisk, parted and GRUB) cannot.  These are enumerated
in different ways by Linux.

For Linux, you may want to consider using the Logical Volume Manager
(LVM) disk label in Linux to setup up 1 slice (one primary partition)
for advanced slice management.  You use a different set of tools for
that -- a 3-tier pv* (physical volume), lv* (logical volume) and vg*
(volume group) suite of tools.  These are enumerated logically,
typically under /dev/vg#/vol## (depending on the configuration, long
story), by Linux.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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