Add a second Hard Drive

[oldfrt]

I have a desktop system and currently have a Hard Drive running PCLinuxOS. There is room and cables for a 2nd Hard Drive and I have an old drive that I would like to connect. I have no idea what was on the old drive, probably Windows but I don't care. I just want to use the 2nd Drive as additional space available for the OS. If I hook it up, what will happen? Will the system recognize it as an HD and then ask me if I want to format it?? I would think that it would have to be formatted as Linux space and then the system has to be updated to know that its available.

Is there a way I can tell the system to use the additional space for certain files??

I searched the form but most of the items had to deal with things that I do not want to do, I DO NOT want to have it bootable, nor have Windows on it. I just want it as additional space to the existing HD.
thanks..Ron

[pupthai]

You should be able to just plug it in and re start the PC.  If it has windows the master boot record won't know about it and nothing should happen.  Then go into control center manage local drives and you should see it as a drive.  I don't know your system but on mine it would be sdb were sba was the orginal drive. you can then format and make partitions with labels and make dir to mount them.

I have a second 250gb drive which is made into several partitions some mounted in home as a data extention and others mounted in root for my local server to use.

The other option is to place the old drive in a cheap caddy box that connects it USB and then work with it as you would any flash drive.

[CaptainSarcastic]

You should be fine, and might just have to adjust the boot order in the BIOS to make sure that your current drive is set to be the boot drive.

That said, I would suggest running a test on the new hard drive before using it as storage space.  If it is loaded with bad sectors then you are just looking to get lost data.  Even just checking the SMART data on the drive would be a good idea, but I'd suggest something that scanned the whole thing.

Once you have the drive in place and are booted back to PCLOS, you can use gparted or the KDE partition manager to format the drive to something usable.  For storage, you could format it to EXT3 or EXT4, or NTFS.  It will be a separate drive, so you would need to move things over from your main drive if you wanted to free up space on it.  Music, video, and large downloads could all go on the secondary drive, keeping your main drive from getting bogged down.

[thorper]

Don't forget you might have to change the jumper settings of your second disk, if it is PATA, so the system recognises it as a slave. Jumper settings should be on a label on the disk.

[oldfrt]

Well I got it to work. I thought I could add it on as space for /home however I couldn't figure that out so I called it 'space' and there it is. I had to change the authorization and now anyone can put stuff on it.
I did get a bit confused on what format but since /home is EXT4 then I used it without any problems. I used PCC but found it a bit confusing so I downloaded KDE Partition Manager and that worked fine.
thanks for the feedback
Ron