Second hard drive question

[kbk]

I just put in this new hard drive, formatted it to ext3, and mounted it. I didn't have any trouble doing any of those things, but now I am not sure what to do. I want to use this drive to backup my current drive because my current one is extremely full, and I was wondering whether I should put my stuff in /mnt/hdb or /mnt/hdb1 ? Or does it even matter? Thanks.

[devils casper]

/mnt/hdb or /mnt/hdb1

is it a typo? hdb is device name and hdb1 is first partition in disk 'hdb'.
can you explain a bit more? i am not getting it?





casper

[kbk]

That's what is in my /mnt folder, here is a picture, maybe this will help...

[devils casper]

i think you created two mount points/folders. did you mount second disk manually or edited /etc/fstab file for mounting at boot up?
post the output of 'fdisk -l' command and contents of /etc/fstab file.




casper

[kbk]

Well I made /mnt/hdb manually, because before I did that there wasn't anything there.. Here's fstab:

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devmode=0666 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
# Dynamic entries below, identified by 'users' option
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 auto noauto,users,exec 0 0

and fdisk -l:

kbk@1[~]$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1        9334    74975323+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1        7475    60042906    7  HPFS/NTFS

[devils casper]

i am confused !
fdisk -l shows that second disk ( hdb ) has NTFS format but you wrote in first post that you formatted it in ext3 format.




casper

[kbk]

I did, and I think I figured it out, part of the disk was still in NTFS because it was only a 8MB partition, so I left it. Right now I am moving files into /mnt/hdb1 and it seems to be working.. Maybe I was just over complicating things, or maybe this will end up not even working at all.. I used KNOPPIX to format the drive btw..

[devils casper]

fdisk is showing only one Partition ( around 60 GB ) in NTFS format.
if you have write access to second disk, then it must be in ext3 format coz by default, Linux doesn't provide NTFS write access.

hmmm.... very strange ! check output of fdisk -l again....




casper

[kbk]

Still says the same. I don't get it either, all I know is it's working... So I guess it's alright?

[antidrugue]

So I guess it's alright?

Perhaps it feels alright, but the partition table on that drive is certainly not accurate. I would correct that before putting data on the drive. Use GParted if you don't feel confortable with fdisk/cfdisk + mkfs.ext3.