[ale] my hard drive

[Joseph A Knapka]

Stephen Turner wrote:
> 
> i got a new 40 gig ata 7200rpm wd hard drive... how do
> i get linux to see it?

You shouldn't need to do anything to make Linux detect
the physical drive; the output of the "dmesg" command
(boot messages that come out before syslog is available)
should contain lines indicating all the drives on the system:

hda: IBM-DKLA-24320, 4108MB w/460kB Cache, CHS=556/240/63, UDMA
hdb: ATAPI 24X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache

Then you need to create partitions on the new drive
(note: a 40GB drive as one single huge partition is
not recommended). Assuming your new drive is /dev/hdc
(first drive on 2nd IDE bus), you will need to do this,
as root:

fdisk /dev/hdc

You will end up with a number of partitions:

/dev/hdc1
/dev/hdc2
...
/dev/hdc8

You then need to make filesystems on the partitions
you want to use:

mke2fs /dev/hdc1

Then mount the partitions:

mkdir /new_drive_part1
mount /dev/hdc1 /new_drive_part1

Once you've done all this manually, you can add entries
to /etc/fstab to have the new drive's partitions mounted
automatically at boot time, if you want.

> and how do i increase my hd
> speed for that one and others to thier best
> performance for this ata and a normal? 5600?

I think "man hdparm" will help you there.

Cheers,

-- Joe
"I should like to close this book by sticking out any part of my neck
 which is not yet exposed, and making a few predictions about how the
 problem of quantum gravity will in the end be solved."
 --- Physicist Lee Smolin, "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity"

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