[Watford] Second Hard Disk

[Yvan Seth]

<quote who="walt">
> How do I get Linux to mount an additional hard disk which I intent to
> use for data storage?
> 
> I am using Suse 10.3 and the hardware monitor reports the disk as
> /dev/sdb but when I try to mount it tells me it can't find it and that
> it cant find this in fstab.  Its already portioned to ext3 and I need
> to get some data off it so I don't want to re-partion it. I suspect
> each partion has to be declared in fstab.  

Hi Walter,

If your disc has a single primary partition on it then you should be
able to access this as /dev/sdb1 ... but it could be different if you
have other partitions or you've used a logical partition.  To find out
all the available partitions you can:
    cat /proc/partitions

To mount /dev/sdb1 try, for example:
    mkdir /mnt/data
    mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/data

If this works for you then you can add the following line to your
/etc/fstab file:
    /dev/sdb1 /               auto defaults 0 1
With that line your system will automatically mount the disc at boot
time.

There are all kinds of other permutations to this of course... Using the
disc UUID instead of /dev/sd<A><N> is considered better these days.  You
could set it up to only mount on demand.  Or to mount as your user.
Even optimising mount parameters for performance!  Google knows all!

> I have no idea how to edit this and gnome seems to have no utility to
> set this up either.

Frankly, I'm surprised that SuSE doesn't automount it... most distros do
these days.  Might be worth checking to make sure it isn't mounted
somewhere, execute the command:
    mount
This will list all the file-systems that are mounted.

-Yvan