[S.u.S.E. Linux] adding a new hard disk
Thanks to everyone for your ideas and advice...I did the deed and
thought a report might be at least mildly interesting as I chose to use
YaST.
In retrospect, I believe that fdisk, mke2fs, edit /etc/fstab would be
the ideal way to proceed, as Michael and Tom suggested. This is not
because there is anything *wrong* with YaST, but because I am familiar
with the operation of these *IX tools in general. I believe that the
old-fashioned way is more consonant with the *IX philosophies of
small-is-beautiful, a-tool-for-every-job and
at-least-one-way-to-connect-each-tool. I hope that LINUX never abandons
the do-it-yourselfer, while going on to create widgets to help those who
may *not* be entirely comfortable with fdisk and mkfs.
This being said, I evoked YaST, told it how to re-partition /dev/hdb,
hastily moved to another console to create mount points and turned it
loose. Here's where some confusion (as we've been hearing in this list)
entered. It (YaST) responded that since I was rewriting disk partition
tables that it (YaST) would rewrite /dev/hda3!!! (my swap on a disk I
hadn't mentioned for repartition!), then YaST would exit and I'd have to
reboot. I have no idea why it would want to mess with my swap space
(since all the changes were to /dev/hdb), but what the hell. I pressed
enter to allow it to proceed, YaST exited and returned me to a root
prompt.
I let it sit at the root prompt for several minutes (while checking
processes on another console) and, after a bit, told it to shutdown -r.
Down she went and up she came, returning to a login prompt. As root, I
checked df...no new disk, so I fired YaST up again.
This time it (YaST) turned up in German...no worries, I can deal with
basic music German and evidently, basic computer German is no different.
It (YaST) remembered how I wanted the disk partitioned, but forgot the
mount points. I told it the mount points again and it responded by
telling me it was creating file systems (in German). After a season we
returned to the press-enter-to-leave-YaST-you'll-need-to-reboot prompt
(in German) and I let 'er rip, returning to a root prompt. I logged in
on another console (in English) to make certain that all was well...it
seemed to be so I gave it a shutdown -h, this time.
After a hard restart...all is well; both disks came up as planned, in
English, and everything where it should be. All my configuration files
(at least those for X that I've checked so far) remain unchanged and I
have roughly 1.7Gb more space. Cool.
In summary (and sorry for the length of what is, after all, a success
report) if I were the nervous type, or completely unfamiliar with German
the YaST thing probably would have upset me. The threat of messing with
/dev/hda3 (swap on drive hda, which I had not offered for change) would
have probably freaked me, but it worked perfectly (sort of).
So now, I'm thinking of going through the fdisk, mkfs thing to see what
(if any) unexpected stuff might occur.
Thanks again to those who had advice or comments to offer...
phil
--
phillip mannie _Novus Ordo Seclorum
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phil@servcom.com