I am a mostly-Mac-user, but I dabble in other OS's occasionally. That being said, while I am confident at a command line, I rarely know what I'm actually doing to the system.

I have a PC that I used to use for testing web work in XP environments. I recently realized that I haven't booted it in almost a year, so I decided to try the great Linux experiment. After looking around I decided on Fedora or SuSe 9 (pro), and Fedora didn't work out.

For the most part, SuSe went really well. I got it installed, and Samba is working to serve files and printers. I have Apache serving my web page, IMAP is going etc.

The other functionality I want is to serve DVarchive (ReplayTV server) and I needed a large hard drive. I slapped in an old 100gb drive, and now I don't know what to do with it. If I open the Partition app, I can see the drive. I added an "extended" partition to it. But I can find no way in which to actually use it to store files.

I then decided that I would reinstall the whole server with both drives installed. The installer wants to make the entire 100gb drive my "root" partition, which I'd rather not do. Is it possible to have a dedicated "files" drive which is accessible from the GUI?

Any help or links to help would be great. Thanks.

This is actually a fairly easy thing to do...what you need to do is to find out what file system the replay server drive needs to be in, if it doesn't matter, AKA, it's just grabbing it over a common network protocol....then I would use either ext3 or reiserfs.

Doing things from GUI is annoying and changes with every distro you have ... so, we'll learn Linux today ... not SUSE. :-)

OK, here's what you do:

1) Find out where your second hard drive is located:
In general, if it's the "Secondary Master" on the IDE chain, it should be located at /dev/hdb. You can test for this by opening up command line and running fdisk /dev/hdb as ROOT, once you find out which device it is we are ready to partition it, so you might as well stay inside of fdisk.

2) In fdisk we are going to create a new partition:
Make sure there is no exisiting partion left over from whatever your did. If there is lets delete it, type P in fdisk to check if there are any existing partitions ... if there are type D and delete all/any.
Now that we have a clean slate lets create a new primary partition. Type N, for a new partition. then choose P for primary, and since this is the only partition going to be on this drive, choose enter for all sizes and positions.

3) Now that we have a partition, we need a filesystem!
This is actually very easy, staying in command line, type: mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1
This is assuming that /dev/hdb was the device we found and that we are going to format the first and only partition .... press enter, aprove the command, and withing a few seconds ... you should be safely home and the command prompt.

4) Auto-mounting the filesytem:
Now that we have a partition, and we have a filesystem, we need to mount it. So...again, staying in command line lets make a new folder ... since you mentioned the "files" drive you wanted how about making a folder in the, "/" = root directory, called, "files"
So, at this point, create this folder: mkdir /files

5) Now that we have the partition the filesystem and the folder, we are ready to mount.
To make this filesystem mount when we boot the computer we need to add it to a file called the "fstab", in Linux, this controls what devices are mounted, checked for errors, etc...
Using your favorite editor in Linux, which should be VI, open the file: vi /etc/fstab

If you haven't used "vi" use something you are comfortable with.

We are now going to add a line to the bottom of the file that looks SOMETHING like this:

/dev/hdb1 /files ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1

Again, do not just copy it, make sure the first three fields are what you need.

After you save the file out, try to mount the folder: mount /files

You shouldn't get an error message ... if you do, check your settings ... if nothing seems to happen that great, well it's probably because it worked just fine. Open your /files directory and start copying files!

Have a nice day.

I am Shayne Sweeney, and I approve this Linux answer.

Dvarchive doesn't require any special file system that I am aware of, and I think the drive is on hdd. I'll give this a shot tonight and report back.

Thanks so much.

Shane-

Okay, it ALMOST works. I was able to do the following:
[list=1][*]On (hdd) I erased all partitions, and created the new partitions (hdd1)[*]I created the file system mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdd1[*]I created the "files" directory "mkdir /files"[*]I edited the fstab: " /dev/hdd1 /files ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1"[*]when I entered "mount /files" I received this error: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdd1, or too many mounted file systems"[/list=1]

Back in the GUI, if I click on the (now visible) hdd1, I get:

"Only ROOT can mount /dev/hdd1 on /files Please check that the disk is entered correctly"

Went through again, same thing. I was wondering as a newbie: when I input "mkdir /files" do I need to make sure I am making it in the /dev/hdd1 volume?

Any ideas of what to try now? Thanks for everything so far.

i dont think it matters to much but my fstab uses tab's rather than spaces

also you couldtry adding the word users or user to acl,user_xattr

why do you put user_xattr in?

So, without going in to too much detail, I printed out the instructions you gave me, and I kept inputting an "l" (letter L) as "I" (letter I). All is working, and I am a proud and happy man.

Now to confuse myself further, what about "Zeroconf" - is it possible to get it running in Suse 9.1 Pro easily?

Thanks again

Mark