Slightly OT (maybe): Adding a new hard drive

[mip]

I need to add an additon hard disk to my machine. The 30Gb disk I have currently is becoming full.

The disk is partitioned as follows:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 63 20547134 10273536 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 20547198 60030431 19741617 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 20547261 30716279 5084509+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda6 30716343 45046259 7164958+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 45046323 46090484 522081 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda8 46090548 60018839 6964146 83 Linux

The reason I have a seconf FAT32 partition is that I wanted to be able to play the audio files I stored there from both windows and linux. However, as I now use windows so infrequently this is no longer a requirement. So I'll probably return all this disk to FAT32 and use the new disk for linux.

What I'd like to do is remove this hard disk and replace it with the new one as master. Then refit the old disk as slave. Is this possible? Will I be able to boot windows? (I use it for the occasional game)

I'd like to partition the new drive (say 120Gb for the example) as follows? Are there any problem that I might encounter with such a scheme?

New Disk
/ 40Gb
SWAP 512 Mb
/home 40Gb
/media 40Gb [Oggs, MP3s etc]

Is it possible to increase the size of FAT32 partitions without having to reformat the disk?

Any hard disk recommendations in the UK?

Thanks for any suggestions/advice.

[mhelios]

What I'd like to do is remove this hard disk and replace it with the new one as master. Then refit the old disk as slave. Is this possible? Will I be able to boot windows? (I use it for the occasional game)
This is certainly possible; I do it at the moment. My primary IDE is /dev/hda and I have a slave set as /dev/hdd. (CD/CD-RW in between) I have a GRUB config that triple-boots FC1, FC2t1, Win98 and I have the Windows boot loader handling XP on hdd. (however if you want GRUB to control all OS loading you can just set up chainloading in the GRUB conf file which is preferable).

I'd like to partition the new drive (say 120Gb for the example) as follows? Are there any problem that I might encounter with such a scheme?

New Disk
/ 40Gb
SWAP 512 Mb
/home 40Gb
/media 40Gb [Oggs, MP3s etc]
This is fine, however I recommend if you want to manually partition the drive that you also add a /boot (76MB), /usr (30GB), /var (10GB) and /tmp (1G). Then, / will only need to be about 1GB. This will be better for a number of reasons including better security (e.g. if someone maliciously tries to overload the /tmp filesystem it will only spread as far as that partition), ease of admin (managing partition integrity and unmounting etc. ), flexibility etc.
Is it possible to increase the size of FAT32 partitions without having to reformat the disk?
Not that I know of. It would logically seem not possible because the space you would to expand to would not be formatted. If you created a new FAT32 partition in the free space and then joined it to the existing partition, this may work. (I know parted can do this..not sure about windows tools..)
Any hard disk recommendations in the UK?
Nope. :D I'm in Australia. But in general, stick with PATA drives at this point; SATA hasn't been refined enough yet IMO, to justify the extra cost. (Maybe the cost is better in the UK..) PATA support is much more mature in Linux as well.

[mip]

Very useful. Thanks.