Formatting and moutning my hdd?

[net_ralf]

Ok following situation. Obviously i am a newbie to linux, in the matter of fact to ubuntu, which i started to like very much. However ading a 2nd hdd started a kind of nightmare. I actually got it working once before i restarted my system. So here is my story. I installed a Western Digital 120 GB hdd to my file server as a primary master. Then i installed Gparted inorder to initilize the disk without the terminal. I set it up as primary partition and set the partition to ext3. So far so good. now i went to the terminal and started to format that disk (hdc1) with the command:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc1 -b 1024 117218241

Dont even know if this is correct or not?
As soon as it finished i went up to system-administration-disks and enabled the disk there and mounted it to the folder "storage". Everything was set up perfectly, windowsxp machines were able to read and write through samba.

Now I decided to give my machine a restart and then to my surprise the hdd didnt even show up during POST. I connected it to a windows machine and it doesnt show up there either. So i wonder how did i detroy a 120 gb hdd with this command???

anyone has a bulletproof approach on how to add a frealing 120gb hdd without destroying it with a restart?

thx in advance

Ralf

[jjmac]

>>
I installed a Western Digital 120 GB hdd to my file server as a primary master.
.
.
.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc1 -b 1024 117218241
>>

Ok, so you put it as primary on the second controller ... it should be quite straight forward.

You will have to format it first before you write a fs to it. I would suggest that you boot into Linux normally, and then pass the dev name as a parameter to "cfdisk", in a root shell. Use either the sudo facility or just type "su" and give the root password.

In cfdisk you can then slice the disk up into multi partition (recomended) or just create the one single partition. Though 120 Gb does seem to be quite large for a single partition, if not wastefull.

After that, exit cfdisk and reboot. Then, from a root shell run your command above.

It may pay to consider the "-m" switch to manipulate the reserved blocks. That will default to 5% of the partition, which for 120 Gbs does become somewhat large.

That should be all there is two it. If not you must have some other problem.

>>
anyone has a bulletproof approach on how to add a frealing 120gb hdd without destroying it with a restart?
>>

Don't use fancy tools like Gparted unless you have no other choice.

Things like fdisk, cfdisk etc are quite good at doing what you want without doing anything screwy in the background.

Check your entry in your /etc/fstab file to make sure you haven't inevitably provided an option that may deny you access. Try to keep it all very simple, and when its working, then add complexity if you need to.

Also, did you jumper the drive properly, were the cables firmly plugged in etc...

--------------------------------------------
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

/dev/hdax       /               ext2    defaults,errors=remount-ro      0 1

--------------------------------------------

Good Luck ...


jm