Adding a Second IDE Hard Drive To Your System





  1. The physical mount.
         Copy down the specs from the label on the drive.
         Make sure it's jumpered as "slave".
         Mount the drive in a spare drive bay, securing it with several screws.
         Attach an IDE cable from the IDE port on the motherboard.
    
  2. Update the BIOS with the info for the new drive.
         It may autodetect, but don't count on it. Check the BIOS settings to make
         certain. Setting the 'LBA' option not necessary.
    
  3. Partitioning.
         Boot up Linux and partition the new drive:
         As root, fdisk /dev/hdb.
         [primary partition, Linux native]
    
  4. Format the new drive.
         mke2fs -cv /dev/hdb1
         [verbose output and check for bad blocks]
    
  5. Create a mount point.
         Decide where you will be mounting it and create a mount point.
         For example, if you will mount it as /mnt/drive2, as root,
             cd /mnt
             mkdir drive2
             chmod 777 drive 2
             [makes the new drive accessible to ordinary users.]
    
  6. Testing.
         As root, mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/drive2.
         If no error messages, cd /mnt/drive2, and try creating a directory and
         writing a couple of files.
         If it works, hurray!
         Continue to the final steps.
    
  7. Modify /etc/fstab.
         Add the following line to /etc/fstab:
         /dev/hdb1         /mnt/drive2          ext2    defaults     1 2
    
  8. Reboot and see if the new drive automounts.



The Hard-Disk-Upgrade miniHOWTO, by Yves Bellefeuille contains much of the above info, but in a somewhat different context.



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