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valid partition table

Hi I'm adding a second hard drive to a linux red hat 9.0 box. It's an IDE drive and I created it as /dev/hda. I'm having trouble mounting it. I get the mesage: "Disk /dev/hda doesn't contain a valid partition table". Can't think what I did wrong.

Thanks

rindi

You have to create partitions on that drive.

fdisk /dev/hda

then m will give you a list of all the options you have. p allows you to create a new partition. Once you are satisfied with the pratitions, you commit the changes with w. q leaves fdisk.

Now you have partitions like /dev/hda1, /dev/hda5 etc., but these aren't formatted yet. Depending on the filesystem you want to use you now have to use different options to format the partitions.

mkfs -j /dev/hda1

will format /dev/hda1 to an ext3 filesystem. After that you can mount it.

The gentoo has a pretty good document for that:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4

timothyking

ASKER

OK the plot thickens. I formatted and partitioned the drive. I then mounted the drive and it appears ok when I issue the command df -h . 2 problems arose.

(1) the mount of the drive will not survive a reboot

(2) the server gives lilo errors and won't boot up unless I use the floopy boot disk

Thanks

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rindi

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timothyking

ASKER

I re-installed the RH9 to the other disk, changed the boot device in the BIOS, used GRUB, and it appears to boot ok. I will check out Fedora although it will take a while to download and create 5 CD's.

Thanks

rindi

If I remember correctly (at least it was that way with FC4, I think), you don't need all CD's. With most linux distro's the first CD is enough. You can tell the installer to install directly from the download site. If you arent' installing all of the packages, that is usually faster. Particularly you only need some essential programs to start of with, then you run an update to get the newest versions from the internet, and after that you install the other packages, which if you do the install directly from the internet, are probably more uptodate than what you have on CD.

But that is personal preference....

Thanks anyway.