Adding a second disc in Mint 13 32bit [SOLVED]

[Jesse_001]

Hi everyone,

I am quite new to linux, but I am enjoying it alot. (Especially 13) I am running 11 on my old laptop at home, and it works like a charm.
So I decided to make myself a media box, and my first choice was mint 13. Anyways, the motherboard only had 2 x SATA slots, so I connected 1 x HDD (2tb) and 1 x DVDR to it and installed mint 13 32bit. (MB too old for 64bit)
The installation went fine, then I shut down and added the second HDD (also a 2tb). My problem is that I can see the HDD in the BIOS, but I can not initialize the disk to use it in Mint.
I did an LS to see what drives were attached (It found it: sdb) I then did: sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS disklabel with disk identifier
I now have no idea on how to initialise, or format the disk in order to use it.
I think its probably a very simple process, but I cant seem to find any help on the subject anywhere.
Thanks guys

J

[wayne128]

do you have anything important to save in the second disk?
are you willing to format it and lose everything inside?

you can use fdisk to format
or you can also run gparted and use it to format

[Jesse_001]

Hi Wayne,

It is a brand new disk.
Sorry for the n00b question, but how do i run gparted?

Thanks

Jesse

[AlbertP]

You can install gparted from the Software Manager and then find it in the menu. It'll ask you for your password before running. It'll probably take some time to load, when it's done you can select a disk at the top-right. As the disk is probably not yet formatted you'll have to create a partition on it, please use NTFS as type if you want to share it with Windows, else you can use ext4.

[Jesse_001]

Gparted installed, and now formatting to ext4.
Thanks guys. I learned alot today.

Thank you!!!!!

[Jesse_001]

Hi again all.

This is sort of related to my earlier post. I have formatted the disk in ext4, and now mounts without an issue.
The problem i am having now is that I can not use the disk, as I do not have permissions to do so.

I have tried: sudo chown <user> /dev/sdb1 (as this is an additional drive that I installed)
It seems to accept this, but I am still unable to create a folder on the drive.

I see the owner of the drive is root.

Thanks and apologies if I have missed something obvious.

[wayne128]

Hi again all.

This is sort of related to my earlier post. I have formatted the disk in ext4, and now mounts without an issue.
The problem i am having now is that I can not use the disk, as I do not have permissions to do so.

I have tried: sudo chown <user> /dev/sdb1 (as this is an additional drive that I installed)
It seems to accept this, but I am still unable to create a folder on the drive.

I see the owner of the drive is root.

Thanks and apologies if I have missed something obvious.

for simplicity, just format the whole drive to ntfs , then you do not need to work on permission issue.

[Jesse_001]

Hi Wayne128

Thanks, I will try that.

Jesse

[altair4]

** If you only have Linux installed on that box it makes little sense to format the partition to NTFS.

** The problem with your attempt to change permissions the way you did:

I have tried: sudo chown <user> /dev/sdb1 (as this is an additional drive that I installed)

You don't change ownership of a device ( /dev/sdb1 ). For a Linux filesystem you change ownership of the mounted partition. For a Windows filesystem you change ownership at the moment of mount. So the way you change ownership in your case is to do something like this only after the partition has been mounted:

Code: Select all

sudo chown <user> /media/<mountpoint>

[Jesse_001]

Hi Altair4,

Thanks for your input. I am going to reformat into ext4 and try your suggestion.
Thanks

Jesse

[aa2k]

Hi,

Use 'Disk Utility' to get it formatted and ready, then get pysdm to mount it, etc..
I am sure you already got it, but there is a program that can make it easier:

Install pysdm (Storage Device Manager) to auto-mount new partition:
# sudo apt-get install pysdm
Located at: System Tools > Administration > Storage Device Manager
(info about this program http://pysdm.sourceforge.net/)

Cheers!

[altair4]

He's already installed gparted to format the "disc" as ext4. PySDM would not be my first choice since it's no longer maintained, makes too many mistakes, does not have a complete list of options, and has no idea what a UUID is.

Really, this isn't an NTFS partition where unless you use a template things can get a little confusing if you are new to this. It's an ext4 partition where a mount in fstab looks something like this:

UUID=076426af-cbc5-4966-8cd4-af0f5c879646 /media/Data ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2

But we are getting way too far ahead of ourselves. The OP never mentioned that he wants to have this partition automount. The original problem was that he never formatted the new disk. Wayne128's suggestion of gparted will fix that. As for having it automount he may be happy with the way it mounts through Nautilus.

EDIT: I have no idea why I just posted It looks like this was marked as [SOLVED] before the last 2 posts.