[wplug] howdy!

[John Harrold]

Sometime in June aroon pahwa assaulted the keyboard and produced:

howdy aroon.

| I'm new to wplug, just found the group yesterday.  I'm an undergrad CS
| major at CMU and interested in learning all I can about linux since I'll
| be using it for the rest of my life!  I got started with linux this summer
| as I use fedora core 1 at work.

Welcome to Linux and to the group.

| Recently I tried using Gentoo [stage 3] and fedora core 2 to run a server
| at home but failed.  I'm still having truoble grasping how linux handles
| system devices, especially harddrives.


I'm going to assume that you are using linux with ide hard drives.
Hardware is normally represented by an entry in /dev, and most ide devices
start with 'hd'. Normally each motherboard will come with two hard drive
controllers: primary and secondary, and each controller can have a drive:
master and slave.  The primary master is '/dev/hda', the primary slave is
'/dev/hdb', the secondary master is '/dev/hdc' and the secondary slave is
'/dev/hdd'. 

Now say you use fdisk in windows to format a drive which is plugged in to
your secondary controller and it is configured to be the master. The
partition you created will be the first partition on the disk and will be
referred to as '/dev/hdc1'. If you didn't use all of the space on that
drive and created another partition, it would be called '/dev/hdc2'. I
think this provides a little better explaination:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/partition-2.html

If you could tell use what specific problems you were having with hard
drives, we could probably provide you with more information.

| I've been using a computer since as long as I can remember and I'm pretty
| proficient with windows in both the workstation and server environment [my
| server is back to running in win2k3 server for now].

You have my pitty here.
  

-- 
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                            | /"\                         
 john harrold               | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign   
 jmh at member.fsf.org      |  X  against HTML mail       
 the most useful idiot      | / \                         
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 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, 
 and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought 
 under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of 
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 --Gandhi
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