2 hard disks and formatting

[Jim Cornette]

Ninad Bapat wrote:

> Hi
>
>    I have 2 hdds both 40gb. ( Say D1 and D2) I have 2 pc's (say P1 and P2)
> P1- new with P4,256mb ram CDR/DVD combo drive etc.and D1 is connected here
> P2 old IBM branded celeron 500 64 mb RAM 52x CD ROM drive BIOS does 
> not support CD booting and D2 is connected here
>  The P1 pc boots XP and FC3 as XP is used by my brother. Also I have 
> installed 2 more distros on this.
>
>
> As the P2 pc does not have a FDD and CD boot is not possible I was not 
> able to load any distros except ubuntu so it was lying idle for some time
> I removed D2 from the old PC P2 and connected in the P1 Pc
> The P1 Pc is detecting it as Primary master and Primary slave.
> Even FC3 recognises it as hdb.
>
> My problems
> 1.I do not remember what filesystem I have created on D2 although FC3 
> shows some partitions. I am unable to mount them.
> 2. Sometimes after booting FC3 or even Slackware when I run dmesg I 
> get some errors of DisK_read io error
> 3.How do i format D2 and create partitions on the same
> 4.My D2 is showing as 32gb even though it is 40 gb. Can this be 
> resolved by formatting it new
>
>
> Thanks and regards
>
> Ninad Bapat
>
>
Make sure the drive does not have a jumper installed that makes it no 
bigger than the 32GB. You should then be able to run fdisk on the drive, 
remove all current filesystems and then create the new filesystems on 
the drive. By default, I believe fdisk (Linux version) will make all 
type 83 Linux.

"man fdisk" or  "info fdisk"  should describe how to make partitions on 
the drive.
For the partitions, you then need to format them after setting up the 
partitions. (Before trying to mount the partitions.
mkfs -j /dev/hdb1 (hdb2 ...) should set up an ext3 partition that you 
could then use after creating mountpoints etc.


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