Adding Sata Hard disk

[saptarshi_mitra]

It's been about a year since I purchased my new Linux System and I feel my 80Gb internal hard drive is running out of space already. So I've decided to purchase a new SATA 500Gb internal hard drive and install it as a second hard drive.

But how do I format and mount the second hard drive in existing Fedora 8 without lossing any data or software ? Kindly help I am a new bee....

[Rubberman]

There are a couple of ways to do this.

1. Copy the system drive to the new drive using the 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb' command, where /dev/sda is the system drive and /dev/sdb is the new drive. Then, fix up the partition table with the fdisk command, and resize the root and/or home partitions with fsck. Finally, switch drives, and reboot (good luck).

2. Boot from a live/recovery CD/DVD. Create the appropriate partitions on the new drive, mirroring those on the old system drive. Then, copy the data (skip the swap partition) from each system drive partition to the appropriate new drive partition. Install grub (the boot manager) on the new drive, swap drives, and reboot (good luck).

3. Swap drives, install FC8 on the new drive, copy data from old drive, and boot (no luck needed, other than making sure that /etc/fstab is properly configured).

Myself, I'd probably go with option #3.

[Jonathan183]

So I've decided to purchase a new SATA 500Gb internal hard drive and install it as a second hard drive.

But how do I format and mount the second hard drive in existing Fedora 8 without lossing any data or software ?

Shutdown the system, connect the second hard drive to the system.

Partition and format the new hard drive I suggest you use something like the PartedMagic live CD, this will allow you to perform the partitioning etc through a GUI.

If you want more specific advice on partitioning I suggest you connect the second hard drive and then post the output of

fdisk -l
mount

the -l has a small L, and the fdisk command requires root access (either su or sudo).

Also tell us how you want to use the 2nd hard drive - as a replacement (Rubberman has posted how to do this above), for data storage, to install a second version of Linux etc.