Adding an additional Hard Drive

[drakebasher]

Well, the good news is, when you run fdisk (on the correct drive, of course!), it will always remind you "Press m for help" or something like that. From there, you can fool around, and if you get nervous, you can always press q to quit with no changes made. Nothing will happen to the drive until you write the changes to the disk. For a Linux partition, you will want type 82 or 83 (one of those is swap: you don't want that one). Again, read what fdisk offers and you'll be fine.

I expect you will want to delete the existing partitions and then create new ones, First you'll create one and then you'll set the type. And remember, you'll still need to format the new partitions (see previous posts). If it's a big drive, you should have several partitions for flexibility. While you're playing around, be sure and press 'p' (print to screen) occaisionally to see the drive layout.

[Tommaso]

Just to take some pressure off, can i actually mess up my drive (say like make my drive become unregonized even by bios) if i do somthing, stupid, or will i just have to continue to try and re-format/partition/etc if i actually mess up?

[drakebasher]

Just to take some pressure off, can i actually mess up my drive (say like make my drive become unregonized even by bios)

I'm pretty sure that fdisk is not able to do that. But if anything did (like Windows), we have solutions for that, too. Just don't do anything really drastic like pull the plug because you pressed the wrong key. The worst that you can do is wipe your Linux. But you just recently installed that, and if you had to do it over, you'd do it smarter anyways. Take risk sooner: learn faster.