Sunday, September 17, 2006

Adding a New / Second Hard Drive on Dapper

(See update post for Edgy)
There are, of course, a few preliminary steps to adding a new hard drive such as installing it and making sure the BIOS recognizes it. As far as ubuntu, I suggest installing gparted with synaptic. This will let you partition and format (I recommend ext3 or Reiser as a filesystem when formatting--do no choose NTFS as it is not very compatible with linux). Gparted will also let you see where the device is located (my new hard drive partition was at /dev/hdd1) and your file system (mine is ext3). So once you have this information, you need to edit fstab.
1. Find out where your hard drive mount point is. In ubuntu, its usually under /media but if nothing is there, you will have to designate a spot. I decided to to mount the new hard drive in /media/Storage. To do this, type the following in a terminal:
sudo mkdir /media/Storage
You can call your folder whatever you like
2. Next type the following in a terminal (make sure you know where your hard drive is from gparted such as /dev/_________):
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
3. Edit the fstab file by adding the following information at the end (use what is already there for guidance:
(Your device location) (Your mount point) (file system type) (options) (0) (0)
Mine looks like:
/dev/hdd1 /media/Storage ext3 defaults 0 0
4. Save the file and close it.
5. I next wanted to change the permissions on the new hard drive so that an average user could read, write, and execute the files located on it. To do this, type the following in a terminal:
sudo chmod -R 777 /media/Storage
(Substitute /media/Storage with your chosen mount point)
6. Reboot and everything should work.

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