Adding a hard drive to Linux

I am chalking out a way to add a drive to a linux system.Please note that it is sporting the RedHat flavour of linux and can work with both Enterprise and Fedora versions.The entire process may contain a hardware and software configuration parts.



The physical Stuff



To add the disk drive to the system,first shut down the system, power it off and attach a new drive.For IDE drives, be sure to set the drive as master or slave as appropriate in the BIOS settings.For SCSI drives, you must select an unused SCSI id for the new device and ensure proper termination of SCSI bus to which the drive will be attached.When the system is powered up, watch the output from the kernel during its initialization.If you dont see any references to the new drive, check /var/log/mesg once the system has booted.If the drive doesn't show up there, try restarting the system and checking the system BIOS.The drive may not be recognized there.



The command stuff



Once recognized,run fsck or one of its variants to create the partitions you need.If the partition is going to be a swap partition, change the partition id type to 0x82



Once the partition table on disk is modified, it may be necessary to also update the in-memory copy of the partition table.Use the partprobe command to do this.



Use mkfs(for help #man mkfs) to create filesystems on each of your new,non-swap, partitions.Swap partitions are marked with mkswap.Take into consideration the intend to use the filesystem labels to mount the filesystem later.Specify them using the -L option.Another way to label a disk is the e2label command.



Related issues



Create any needed mount points in your current filesystem hierarchy.Keep in mind that directories used as mount points need not be empty,but any files in the directory are temporarily unavailable when a filesystem is mounted on that mount point.



Add entries for the new filesystem to /etc/fstab.Check these entries with mount manually before you reboot.This will not only make filesystem management simpler, but will call the system initialization scripts to mount, check and provide information to other utilities like the dump



Checklist of files are:



1) /etc/fstab

2) /etc/mtab

3)/proc/partitions



Also refer these links as additional reference:



http://www.skullbox.net/newsda.php

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialAdditionalHardDrive.html





The articles on filesystems management are on open domain and for reference



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