D-cat

There's no feedback, you'll just eventually get the prompt back when it's done.

My time guess was assuming a modern system. The time it takes as affected by your resources, processor, and most of all drive throughput. My 3GHz dual core could probably do an 80GB sata (do they exist that small?) in 10 minutes, while a 1 GHz with an 80GB UDMA/66 IDE drive will probably take closer to the hour.

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bigpappajohn1984

You said that:

"When that's done, all you have to do is figure out where you want to mount it in your directory tree and put it in the fstab."

Where would I want to mount it so that it is accessible and easy to access so that I can use it as a backup hard drive to store movies, music, etc. on?

And also, I have NO idea how to edit the fstab, so help on that would be greatly appreciated as well.

D-cat

External drives usually mount themselves in /media. Static mounts (internal devices) would historically go in /mnt (like /mnt/hd2), but you can put it anywhere you want that doesn't conflict with an existing system directory. IOW: you can have it in /home/john/multimedia if you so choose. This is totally up to you.

When it comes to your /etc/fstab, you can generally follow examples already given. Say you chose an ext3 partition and you wanted it in /mnt/stuff, the line you'd add to fstab is

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/stuff ext3 users,rw 0 0

if you formatted as NTFS, you'd add some options to avoid permissions problems:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/stuff ntfs-3g rw,users,umask=0,gid=users,utf8=true 0 0

There are other ways to do this as well (like if you have one of those newer computers where device assignments are dynamic, you can use the partition's uuid instead of the /dev/sd(xy) assignment- this is default behavior in the install scripts of modern distros), but I don't think there's a particular need for that right now.

Where ever you choose to mount the drive, make sure the directory physically exists first (like sudo mkdir /mnt/stuff); mount does not add directories, it takes over an existing one.

You need root permissions to save fstab, so you can use a text editor such as gedit like this:
[Alt + F2] to bring up a run dialog
type gksu gedit /etc/fstab
You may get another dialog asking your password.
gEdit with fstab loaded should appear. Careful with this one, it has root permissions and can overwrite any file while it's open. Another note, fstab must end with a blank line. Make your addition, save, and exit.

Now you can mount the drive with sudo mount /dev/sdb1 . The drive should be mounted automatically on the next boot.