[PLUG] Disk Drive Puzzlers

[guy1656]

At the last clinic, a kind soul helped me get Caldera 2.2 running on my 
233Mhz ATX box. We (mostly he) also installed a new HD. I got to learn a bit 
about fdisk, fsck, looking in dmesg, editing fstab, and linking.

But not enough - when the 'new' disk drive DIED 4 hours later, I bought a 
replacement (and this time NOT from Fry's...) 

Now I've been trying to install the new one myself with 4 Linux books for 
company:
Siever, "Linux in a Nutshell"
Ball, "Teach Yourself Linux in 24 Hours"
Wells, "Linux! I Didn't Know You Could Do That..."
Welsh & Kaufmann, "Linux A-Z"

To derail any RTFM comments in the bud, I can state that NONE of these books 
has an index entry for 'mount point.' This is a term I learned at the clinic, 
and since it's missing from these books, we know that NONE of them have the 
proper detail or organization to teach people how to install a new hard 
drive. There's also no explanation for what the zeros mean in

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ext2 defaults 0 0 

or when you might want to use other digits. Anyways, I've had to run on 
memory.

PUZZLER #1: The CHS numbers in the disk drive are different from what the 
BIOS guesses if set to 'AUTO' (so I manually entered the CHS from the manual 
into BIOS and left LBA as AUTO,) and then dmesg comes up with a third set of 
numbers. Which ones are correct? 

So we know that the new HD is being found, at least. Using the CHS numbers 
from dmesg, I created two partitions and formatted them (I think - mke2fs?)

Now we're at that 'mount point' point. PUZZLER #2:

mkdir /mnt/hdb1? 
ln /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1?
ln -s?
mkfs?  (So far this one says it's "not a block special device.")

Lastly, PUZZLER #3:

I have a CDROM, a floppy and two hard disks, but ls mnt/ shows:

cdrom fd0 fd1 floppy floppy2  /hdb1* /hdb2*
 
(Of course, /hdb1 and -2 aren't working yet)

But what are fd0, fd1 and floppy 2?

-GLL