I have a server that has 2 IDE channels, no spare IDE cards, and 4 hard drives that I want to be running. This will obviously take up all 4 drive spaces in my 2 IDE channels. But to install the OS, I will need to use one of those spaces for the CD-ROM drive, meaning I can only install the OS with 3 of the drives.
To put the fourth drive in there, I would remove the CD-ROM drive after installation of the OS and put in the fourth hard drive. So how do I configure Linux to recognize the fourth and final drive? On my Fedora Core system, it's easy. These steps will assume the drive is already partitioned and formatted.
The mount point. First, make the directory for the mount point. For instance, I'll create a directory in the /mnt directory:
mkdir /mnt/mynewdrive
The fstab entry. You'll have to know which letter your drive has been assigned, and the partition number of your volume. Likely, it will be hdd, since hda, hdb, and hdc will be assigned to the first three. And if the drive is just one large partition, it will obviously be partition 1. So, the desired volume in this instance would be hdd1. Thus, you can map /dev/hdd1 to the /mnt/mynewdrive directory by editing /etc/fstab with the following line:
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/mynewdrive ext3 defaults 1 1
Naturally, substitute ext3 with whatever filesystem you're using, if different.
You could avoid using an editor to make this change by doing a command like this:
echo /dev/hdd1 /mnt/mynewdrive ext3 defaults 1 1 >> /etc/fstab
First-time mount. Then, simply call a mount command:
mount /mnt/mynewdrive
You'll only have to do this the first time. If you have automounting set up, the drive will automount in the future.