Thanks to everyone who advised about creating and formatting
/dev/hdb1. I'm going to try to answer everyone's questions and then
tell you what worked. Don't ask me why it did or did not work. I don't
have a clue. This is in the spirit of running an experiment and
writing in the notebook what happened, with no (OK, very little)
attempt at interpretation.
I'm running kernel 2.6.13-15-default. For whatever reason, creating
the partition /dev/hdb1 on /dev/hdb did not create a block device file
in /dev. /dev/hdb showed up in dmesg | grep hdb, but still nothing in
/dev.
I dropped to the command line because parted under Yast gave me an
obscure error message when trying to format the disk. I thought I
might get more information, and that maybe some of it might even be
helpful, not to mention finer control, if I used the command line. On
the whole, both ended up being true.
fdisk and cfdisk found the unformatted partition and thought that it
was type 0x83 (Linux). I need to use the ext2 filesystem because I
swap /dev/hdb's. Audio files--at least in the quantity I have and
generate them--are just waaay too big to keep on one hard disk. I
don't want to have to mess around with /etc/fstab filesystem types
when I change the drive. I found out (it was on the Internet, so it
has to be correct, right? <g>) that ext2 can handle quite a bit more
than 500GB.
Here's what finally worked. I swapped out /dev/hda for one containing
kubuntu 8.something. kubuntu also recognized /dev/hdb (which it was
calling /dev/sdb, despite it's being EIDE and not SCSI) as being an
0x83 partition. After a bit of experimenting the command line
mkfs -V -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
got me a partition of 500GB minus the amount used for housekeeping.
Why did this work when the same thing didn't under Suse 10.0? Beats me!
So that's the end of this story.
Again, I thank everyone for responding. This is a great resource, and
I appreciate everyone's willingness to help.
Howard Sanner
linux-au...@terrier.ampexguy.com
