Adding Spare eSATA 2.5 Spare HDD to HP Proliant Linux OS

1) Install hard disk to your computer
2) boot your computer
3) dmesg | less
                                         From the output, look for an indication that the new hard disk was found. For example, if it is a secound IDE, you should see "hdb". in the output.Be sure you idenify the right disk or your will erase all the data from disks you probably want to keep!

4)  Use the fdisk command to create partitions on the new disk. For example, if u are formatting the second IDE disk (hdb), you could type the following:
 fdisk /dev/hdb1

5) If the disk had existing partitions on it, you can change or delete those partitions now, Or, u can simply reformat the shole disk to blow everything away. Use p to view all partitions and d to delte a partition

6) to create a new partition, type the following:
n

7) To choose primary partitin, tyep the following
p  
                  u r asked the partition number.
8) If u r creating the first partition (or if there will only be one partition), type the number one:

1
9) U r asked to enter the first cylinder number
10) u  r asked to enter the last cylinder number

depend on ur partitons complete the partition
11) Type w to write the dhanges to the hard disk.
12) To make the file system
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1                 # depends on ur partiton
13) Make one directory where u want to mount the partition
example /mnt/newdisk
14) Edit the fstab file
/dev/hdb1               /mnt/newdisk             ext3         defaults         1 1

Add one line like the on e shown above for each partiton

That's it

Best of Luck
 

Only Proliants that take 2.5" disks have RAID controllers in them, Linux doesn't come into it, you add the spare in hardware configuration. You can either do this live if you have the Array Configuration Utility installed through the Proliant Support Pack or boot the smartstart CD and run the ACU from there.

There again you may have something totally different since HP don't use eSATA for anything, all their external stuff is SCSI or SAS attached.

it's the DL380 G5 came with 2 of 2.5 eSATA HDD.  and i am sure it's Linux os.  the person who shipped them said i need the os boot disk to setup the space but i didn't have that and i was able to get the iso for it but don't know how to accomplish this.  i just want to use the 3rd drive as a hot spare.

:) sorry i meant to say SATA!  thanks!

you know you're the first person I have hear of using SATA disks in these servers; we must have sold 500 of them and not one has had SATA disks in it. They're certainly available as an option but HP's offerings on 2.5" SATA is so poor I can't see any sense in buying them. Mission critical server that supports mirrored RAM, dual PSUs, redundant fans yet gets 1 year warranty SATA's in it. We've shipped quite a few 3.5" SATA's because they have the size for archival and backup but no 2.5" SATAs for DL 3xx series. Would appreciate hearing your experience of them after you get the server bedded down.

andyalder... thank you so much all is working and good.  one more thing i want help and of course i will add 250points to the current.  i also have a new external storage configured and connected directly to the server through fiber.... how can i mount that?

thanks.

I'm not a Linux expert so it's probably best you ask a seperate question.