Amahi Forums

Hello Forum,

after building my Amahi server i used the very helpful page 'Adding a second hard drive to your HDA' on the WIKI pages. There were however a few things that I found a bit confusing:

Make sure your drive is detected by the BIOS

It should be listed in the drives that appear when you boot your computer, before the Fedora boot screen appears. You can also enter you BIOS and confirm they appear there.

In a lot of BIOS'ses certain hard drives are not listed. SATA drives using AHCI, drives connected to an (on board) add-on card and there are probably more. In my Ahahi server (and my desktop) there are NO hard drives listed in the BIOS, only a DVD drive. Small point, I know.

From the HDA desktop (or using VNC), Open Terminal as root and type gparted to launch the GParted application.

I installed Amahi using the Express CD, so there is no desktop after install, that also means that GParted won't run. I'm not sure if there is a way to make it run in in a terminal, but I couldn't find it. So i tried Parted, Fdisk, CFdisk but i could not get any of them to make EXT3 partitions. I googled for a solution, and hey, it's Linux so there were a LOT, dating back to 1995 (or so)..... I'm not a complete Linux noob (almost) and it was a bit confusing but it worked in the end.

You'll probably want to create a single partition, and format it as ext3.

I did and when I ran 'HDA-diskmount' I got:
UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx /var/hda/files/drives/sdb1 ext4 defaults 1 2
So, EXT4, just as in the WIKI. Does that mean anything? Is it important?

Note that Windows can't read ext3 partitions, so if you want to read your disk on Windows, you should format as NTFS instea, and you should do that on Windows before you connect the drive in your HDA.

I had to read that a couple of times before I understood, that what was probably meant here, that if you install Windows on the same server as Amahi (dual boot) you'll run into trouble. Are people really doing that? My first thought was that I couldn't access the disks with a Windows client....

Be sure to read the last section about NTFS on this page if you use a NTFS partition!

This line added to the confusing cause the link doesn't go anywhere (?). Well, maybe it's just me.

After getting to this point I added my drives to the Greyhole storage pool and all is working perfectly! Really like Amahi/Greyhole so far.


Like Guillaume wrote somewhere on this forum: " There are good reasons why we have our own wiki page on how to add secondary hard drive, and we don't just forward you to the hundreds of already existing pages that do something similar."

I totally agree! If your not a Linux expert (I'm not), the multizillion internet pages telling you how to do something in Linux (that just won't work exactly that way in your situation) are confusing and time consuming. So, if I'm not the only one, updating the WIKI page would be great!


Richard

All valid points.

See the changes I made to the wiki page here: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php?title=A ... ldid=14947

Hello Guillaume,

That's quick! I don't think I'm qualified to judge if what you wrote really works, but I shall assume it does... The part about using CFdisk looks almost exactly like what i did, so that probably works...

Personally I wouldn't bother with the NTFS stuff at all. People pulling disks out of a Linux server and putting them in a Windows server (or dual booting) probably know what they are doing and if not, they shouldn't be doing that. In any case it's not an Amahi problem, let Microsoft worry about their limited ability to read file systems. Yeah, right.

There are some links not working:

In the paragraph "Partition and format the hard drive", the last link to 'open terminal as root' does nothing. Same for the first link to 'open terminal as root' in de paragraph 'Using CFDisk'.

Nice to see that Amahi is so actively maintained!

Richard

is it possible to add usb extenal hard drive?

Yes. Just follow the same procedure.