New SATA Drives

street9009 · #1 29th December 2005, 03:01 PM

Hello all,

I have a FC3 machine that I've enjoyed immensely. I never dreamed I'd be using Linux but I rolled the dice back in May and have been hooked ever since.

A few days ago, I received 2 brand new SATA hard drives (WD Caviar SE16 SATA 150MB/s 400GB HD - link ). I thought I was going to be slick and do a fresh install of FC4 on the 2 new drives and then just selectively import settings and files from the old IDE. Needless to say I ran into some problems.

The first problem I'm having is FC4 isn't recognizing them at their full capacity. My knowledge of SATA is limited so I'll admit I may have done something wrong but it seemed to me Fedora picked them just fine.

[stephen@aeon ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
721G 9.6G 674G 2% /
/dev/sda1 99M 16M 78M 18% /boot
/dev/shm 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm

As you can see, I'm about 80 gigs short, and I'm not sure why it's reporting 10 gigs in use. Does an "everything" install of FC4 really take up that much space?

Second problem is a bit more perplexing, at least to me. After I got FC4 up and running last night (updated, etc) I hooked the IDE back in. First problem with that was it booted from it. Easily fixed by telling the BIOS not to boot from IDE. FC4 just plain wouldn't boot with both hooked up. I think it has something to do with how the partitions are labeled but I can't be sure. So again thinking I was going to be slick, I took the IDE out and put it in an external enclosure I have and fired it up. It worked fine (or so it seemed). Most of the files I'm used to seeing on the IDE drive weren't there and a bunch I've never seen before were.

Can anybody help me with these issues? Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

pparks1 · #2 29th December 2005, 03:48 PM

As far as hard drive space is concerned, the amount of space reported by HD mfg's does not match what a computer uses to determine capacity.

The computer expects 1GB to be 2 raised to the power of 30. So, 1,073,741,824. The hard drive manufacturer says, 1,000,000,000 is 1GB.

Therefore, doing the math your 400GB drives are going to show up around 370MB each. So, you will lose 60-80GB or so when they are put together in a logical volume.

If you did an "everything" install, (which I would NEVER recommend), it's likely that you are eating up close to 10gigs of space, based on how the OS is going to report it.

As far as the IDE drive in the enclosure showing different files than you expected, no good answer here. Sorry.

street9009 · #3 29th December 2005, 04:26 PM

Thanks for shedding some light on that predicament. At least I know what's going on with the spacing now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pparks1

If you did an "everything" install, (which I would NEVER recommend), it's likely that you are eating up close to 10gigs of space, based on how the OS is going to report it.

What's wrong with an "everything" install?

pparks1 · #4 29th December 2005, 04:38 PM

My problems with an everything install are as follows:

#1. Fedora (any most distros) come with a boatload of software. Installing "everything" just installs way too much. Most people aren't likely to use 1/8 of the stuff installed. For example, does your Linux machine need to be a DHCP server, a DNS server, a mail server, an FTP server, a NEWS server, an IMAP server, a MySQL/Postgres server, and the list goes on and on and on. If you did an everything load, it's all there.

#2. With an everything load, you have to update a truckload of packages everytime you do a yum update. Why spend time and bandwidth updating thousands of packages that you aren't even using?

#3. With an everything load, you have a much greater potential to have packages installed which might have a security hole. Why risk having your box hosed based on a package you likely aren't using?

#4. Doing an everything load just takes so much time to actually install. You can cut down your install time substantially by only installing the packages that you actually need or want.

#5. It's super easy (using RPM) or using the Add/Remove Programs option in X Windows to add in the packages that you need.

Again, it's just a preference, but I like to keep my box as simplistic as possible and add things back as I need them.

street9009 · #5 29th December 2005, 04:47 PM

Point taken, and since I haven't gotten much to work (some, not much) I may do another complete reinstall with just what I want. It was a lot of updates I downloaded last night. Do you think leaving the IDE hooked up during the reinstall would solve my problem?