N00B question about adding another hard drive.

[wubbabunz]

I'm a total n00b at using linux altogether but so far, using gentoo and kde have been working great and i've totally enjoyed it.

But here's my situation:

I've done a full install of gentoo and kde. Everything is up and running. I have it set up so that you can choose to boot from either windows xp professional or gentoo. But what I want to do now is add another hard drive that I've had from an older computer which has windows xp home edition already installed. I've also got a lot of mp3 files that I'd like to keep and use on gentoo.

If anyone could help me out, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

[exeter]

All you have to do on the software side is make sure NTFS support is compiled into your kernel or as a module. Since you probably have to power down the machine to install the new HD anyway, if you like compiling stuff into the kernel, just go ahead. If it's a USB or hot swap drive, and you don't want to power down, just compile it as a module, load it using modprobe, and you're done.

Then, just mount it and go. (e.g. mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/winxp) Of course, you will want to create a directory (probably under /mnt) to use as a mount point, too.

[wubbabunz]

Thanks for the help. Does the same go with adding another cd-rw and more RAM?
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"Is RAM drive an installation process?"

[fallingcow]

Put the hard drive in the computer, and make sure that the BIOS is recognizing it. I'm assuming you can do this part; if not, please say so and I -- or someone else -- will probably try to walk you through it.

The drive is probably formatted as NTFS, which means that you will be able to read it in linux, but you won't be able to write new stuff to it. If you want to be able to add new stuff, this whole process will get a lot more complicated, so I'm going to assume for now that you don't.

As you may know, IDE hard drives in Linux are usually labelled as follows:

/dev/hda
/dev/hdb
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdd

Ok. So, one of these is your main hard drive that you have Linux and XP Pro on. You probably know which one that is, as you've gone through the install process. So, the new drive shouldn't be using that name. Also, one of the above labels should belong to your Optical drive (I assume you have one), so you can scratch that one off the list of potentials, provided you know what it is. That leaves 2 other possible locations.

Use fdisk... or, hell, just "emerge cfdisk" and use it instead, it's way better for doing what we're about to do... and check the two above-listed locations that weren't eliminated as possibilities in the above paragraph. One of them should have one or more partitions on them, probably labeled "HPFS/NTFS" or something like that (I'm doing this from memory, but it's close to that I know). That's the drive we want; remember the name of it, and remember how many partitions it has.

For each partition, make a directory like "/mnt/old_hd_1", and so on. Then, try issuing the command (substituting for "/dev/hdb" the name of your drive which we determined in the previous paragraph):

[exeter]

[Archangel1]

In terms of drive letters, the most likely configuration is that your old one is hda, and the new one you're putting in will be hdb. This isn't 100%, but it would be the 'normal' way of doing it.

I'm assuming you're not after booting from it, since you've got Pro already - if you want to write to that drive, the best way is probably to boot into your Pro install and do it from there.

[wubbabunz]

Thanks a lot guys for your help, it all worked out. I'm glad everyone's so helpful.
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"Is RAM drive an installation process?"