[ALUG] Help me to help someone!

[Wayne Stallwood]

I skimmed the posts and I couldn't see any mention of filesystem type
for the external/2nd hard drives

Do we know what it is ? the external drive sounds like it may be
behaving as if it is NTFS. In which case he needs to install ntfs-config
and its dependencies and then run sudo ntfs-config and check the options
to enable write access.

A copy of the output of tail -f /var/log/messages as the external drive
is plugged in may help here.

> 
> So, instead of the "/dev/hda1" etc. that I'm used to, there's a huge
> "UUID=...." identifier for the "hda" device, which is different
> according to each partition on the device.

This is the new way :)

It's better because the UUID is of course unique to each volume which
means that there is no chance of drives being mounted in the wrong
places if something causes device nodes to reshuffle (happens a lot to
those with advanced docking stations on laptops that include a drive
bay)
With UUID's you could literally swap master/slave jumpers about etc and
still have a working computer.

To get the UUID in the first place you run 'sudo vol_id /dev/hdb1'
Then insert this in your new line in fstab as per the others.

Although just because some volumes are using UUID in fstab doesn't mean
that they all have to..you are still free to add device nodes as before.
However I recommend he take the 5 mins extra effort to do it with UUID.

By the way another cool thing you can do is set Labels (e2label for ext
partitions) and then define your disks by Label=blah rather than using
UUID's or device nodes.