Hi guys,

Ok!

Here is my next big mission.

I need to add a 500GB drive to my linux box, basically, it'll be a '500GB' share.
Oh, the drive is a SATA drive, but my current drive is IDE.

However, I honestly have no idea what to do from the get go.
I'm scared just putting the drive in will mess things up.

Can someone guide me step by step on what to do - the HDD was used on a Windows PC so I'm guessing I'll probably have to format it.

Oh! Samba is already setup for a share, but I want to remove this share and replace it with 1 500GB share.

Thanks!

Plug the drive in and see what happens.

Some bios' do not support mixing IDE and SATA drives.
Once you boot to linux, open a terminal and enter

fdisk -l

(you'll need to be root)

this will show you the detected drives and how they are partitioned.
use gentoos partition tools to repartition and format the drive.

work out where you want the file system mounted, and edit /etc/fstab to put it there.
I don't know what you mean by "500GB share".

Basically, it'll be 1 big share (500GB) on the linux box, I'll prob call it "public"

I don't know what you mean by "share" in this context.

Do you mean that you intend to put only one partition on the drive, format it, then mount the file-system on a mountpoint called "share" someplace, say /mnt/share, so that all users can access it? Do you mean that you want to make the drive contents available over a network? Both? Neither?

The usual method is to plug the drive in, work out its block special device and file system, mount the file system to a mount-point. At which point, the drive becomes a seamless part of the overall file system tree. Gnu/linux does not distinguish physical drives like windows does, so we don't use a lot of the odd concepts that windows users have to put up with.

LOL @ Simon,

Just remember, I'm basically a Windows boy who has just recently come to Linux.
But yes, 1 partition, 1 share for that partition.

Okay, so I put the drive in;

PC booted up and then when I typed "fdisk -l"

This is what I see:

Nothing about the other drive... ?

The first big bump in the road is that I have no monitor attached to the PC.
I will bring one home tomorrow from work - will help a bit more.

look in dmesg for references to a sata drive.

check your sata settings in bios - but it is possible you have one that won't do sata and pata together. you can try see if both drives get detected by a live disk.

Still don't know what "share" means - you put file systems on partitions - you mount a file-system.

Microsoft is the software equivalent of the United States - "the rest of the World" does not exist. MS folks use non-standard language as part of the lockin... its all marketing.