[SOLVED] New Linux User - How to Format and Mount a 2nd Drive

[sparcnz]

Hello All, Thanks for letting me join this forum.
I am in need of help. First of all let me say I am not a Linux user and I am in a steep learning curve.

My problem: I have openSUSE 11.2 installed on my PC, the install went well and was quite pleased with the OS. Howeve, because I only had a small 40Gb hard-drive I decided to buy a new Western Digital Green 1Tb SATA drive for storing my music etc.
Now this is where I have run into difficulty. I can't get the OS to see the new drive, I did a search and found some instructions on how to format, mount, setup the 2nd drive but I either missed something or I just didn't do it correctly.
In the end I could see the drive under Nautilus and that was it. I can't write to it because it says I don't have permission ????
I can't seem to make new directories, most likely because I don't have permission.

If needs be I will be willing to go back to the beginning and start installing the drive again. I don't mean to beliitle the Linux OS and users but using Windows$ all my life (I'm 49) I find it a lot easier, but I am willing to learn this new OS (for me that is).

Any help would be gratefully received. Kevin.

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome,
First things first, boot up Suse and open a terminal window...login as root or use sudo, depending on your system setup and post the output of these commands please.

fdisk -l

That's a lowercase L in the above command. It will list your partitions for us.

mount

The above command will tell us what is already mounted and where it's mounted to.

cat /etc/fstab

This command will list all partitions that are already available and configured.

[sparcnz]

Thank you Mike for your reply.
Here is the information you requested.

from fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40016019456 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e5f22

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         262     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2   *         263        4865    36973597+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xecac8f1e

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

from mount

/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,acl,user_xattr)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
/proc on /var/lib/ntp/proc type none (ro,bind)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/robert/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=robert)

And from cat /etc/fstab

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST340014A_5JXJK9KY-part1 swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST340014A_5JXJK9KY-part2 /                    ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 1
proc                 /proc                proc       defaults              0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0
usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5       0 0

I hope this information helps?

Regards Kevin.

[MikeTbob]

Okay, a couple more commands and you should be golden.
Use root or sudo as before.

mkdir /mnt/data

This creates a new directory. You can change data to whatever you like, it's your call.

nano /etc/fstab

This command opens the fstab file in an editor, add the line below and press Ctrl X to exit, Y to save, and finally press enter one more time.

/dev/sdb1          /mnt/data           ext4        auto,defaults,umask=0         0 0

I'm assuming you formatted the drive as ext4, change that if necessary. Your drive should be available after a reboot. Look in /mnt/data/

[yancek]

Not sure nano text eidtor is available in a default installation of OpenSuse. Its default editor is kwrite so if the above command doesn't work just change it to: kwrite /etc/fstab

[sparcnz]

Hi MikeTbob and yancek, Sorry for the delay in replying, busy busy busy, work, wife(home) etc.
I still had problems in mounting the drive so reinstalled SUSE 11.2 completely. This allowed me to add the new drive, not the best way but it got the job done.
Still no totally happy with the way it was done, so will see a Linux user here in NZ and go through it with him. Once I see how to do it and learn the commands required I am sure it not be aproblem in the future. Regards Kevin.
BTW I have kept a copy of this thread in case I need the info again later.