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

[William A. Mahaffey III]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:

>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.
>  
>

As hazy recollections are revisited, I am almost certain that I did the 
160 GB (about 2 years ago) w/o fdisk or equivalent (I expected 
mkreiserfs to fail if there were problems ....). I redressed that this 
time. I setup the 400 GB drive as ext3, after fsidk-ing it into 1 large 
partition. I then moved everything off of the 160 GB & re-did it 
(fdisk/mkreiserfs, rather than just mkreiserfs) & moved everything back. 
We'll see about reliability, stay tuned :-) ....

-- 
	William A. Mahaffey III

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	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
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