hello and good evening everyone. i had the opportunity to pick up a sparc 20 machine at a great price, so i took advantage of the opportunity. i also purchased a new scsi hd that i had no problems installing into my machine. [it shows up during regular boot up phase] this is my very first *nix machine and i'm running red hat 6.2 -- my problem is that i do not know how to access this hard drive!

i noticed during bootup that i get configuration messages stating something about 'sdb#' ... i've tried to mount these file systems but i've not had any luck whatsoever. i'm in drastic need of storage space, and am desperate for someone to help me out so that i can access this drive.. :-)

thank you in advance,
-lusterko

well, first you have to setup partitions and format your new hard drive, you do this with fdisk


since you said it appears at boot up as sdb
s
type fdisk /dev/sdb where the is the new hd


partition the HD (type m for help on partitioning)


you will need to calculate blocks to MB or KB if you plan to configure more than one partition on the drive
fdisk, i believe allows you to configure up to 4 primary partions otherwise you create an extended partition, i don't use fdisk much so i don't know much about this, but once you are done, make sure the partition types are linux (hex code 83) or linux swap (hex code 82), write the partition table in fdisk, quit, then use mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdbX where sdb is your drive and X is the partition number


mkswap if you want to make a swap partiton


then create directories in the /mnt directory (or anywhere really) as mount points for the new volumes (the partitions on the new drive)


then enter the volumes into the fstab along with the mount points and a few other arguments for each (emacs, or whatever editor you use /etc/fstab), or use linuxconf if you have it


once this is done, your new drive should be up and ready to go


note, inputting the new hd isn't 100% crucial for it to work, but if you do enter it into the fstab it can automatically mount at boot time, and be fscked at boot time as well


hope this helps, cheers