You got a new large disk. What to do? Well, on the software side:
use fdisk (or, better, cfdisk) to create partitions,
and then mke2fs to create a filesystem, and then mount
to attach the new filesystem to the big file hierarchy.
You need not read this HOWTO since there are no problems
with large hard disks these days. The great majority of
apparent problems is caused by people who think there might
be a problem and install a disk manager, or go into fdisk
expert mode, or specify explicit disk geometries to LILO
or on the kernel command line.
However, typical problem areas are: (i) ancient hardware, (ii) several operating systems on the same disk, and sometimes (iii) booting.
Advice:
For large SCSI disks: Linux has supported them from very early on. No action required.
For large IDE disks (over 8.4 GB): get a recent stable kernel (2.0.34 or later). Usually, all will be fine now, especially if you were wise enough not to ask the BIOS for disk translations like LBA and the like.
For very large IDE disks (over 33.8 GB): see IDE problems with 34+ GB disks below.
If LILO hangs at boot time, also specify
linear in the
configuration file /etc/lilo.conf.
There may be geometry problems that can be solved by giving an explicit geometry to kernel/LILO/fdisk.
If you have an old fdisk and it warns about
overlapping partitions:
ignore the warnings, or check using cfdisk that really all is well.
If you think something is wrong with the size of your disk,
make sure that you are not confusing binary and decimal
units
,
and realize that the free space that df reports on an empty disk
is a few percent smaller than the partition size, because there
is administrative overhead.
Now, if you still think there are problems, or just are curious, read on.