Hard Drive on Ubuntu Box

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Alright I have 2 Hard Drives. One is a 13GB which is what Ubuntu is on. The other is a 60GB & is currentely not in use. The 60GB is also on the NTFS partition. How do I mount the 60GB & put it in a linux file system instead of NTFS.

well, first make sure that you've got all the data off the NTFS drive. If you have to convert it from one to the other, there's a possibility that you'll lose a lot.

I've never seen a 13Gig drive; could that be the size of the largest partition?

Actually, I've never had to make a partition, except under Red Hat, eons ago. I'd go on the web, and just Google your question. Failing that, search for Ubuntu sites, and forums, that might have your answer.

Actually, the question you might want to find out is; do I even need to reformat the partition?

You could use Gparted live CD to reformat the 60 gb partition/hard drive to ext3, if you really wanted to.

Well the computer is pretty old. It is only a 750Mhz Athlon w/ 512MB Memory & a 8 MB Diamond Speedstar A200 Video Card @ AGP 4X. It has a 13GB Maxtor HD as a Primary & a 60GB Maxtor as a slave.

I would think you would have to reformat. Considering the fact that the 60GB is in NTFS & Ubuntu can't read that. However I'm a N00B w/ Linux so I don't know.

Ubuntu certainly can read NTFS partitions. It's pretty adept at writing them, these days, but that's not so recommended, as Microsoft can arbitrarily change the file system spec (NTFS is proprietary). I.e read=safe, write=probably.

There's no need to reformat, probably. Run a defrag on the NTFS drive, then use GPartEd to shrink it. A backup of anything you would hate to lose might be in order.

The basic "partition table" then allows you to chop the drive up into four "primary" partitions. One of those is permitted to be an "extended partition", inside which you can create as many "logical" partitions as you like.

E.g. ==========

My main drive here has a small primary FAT32 partition, which is handy for boot stuff, and does actual have the ntldr stuff to get to my old XP, which is in a logical partition on the other drive.

Next I have my "extended" partition, inside which there are six "logical" partitions. I end up with two more primary partitions, the first of which has this Ubuntu in in.

Bar for the first partition all these are ext3 (journalling) file systems.

The other drive has a similar layout, except that the extended partition only contains four logical partitions. One of those is my Linux swap partition (a paltry 1.3Gbytes). Another of those logical partitions is where XP lives.

I seem to have rather a mish-mash of file systems on this drive - even an ext2, lurking there - for no particular reason.

In amongst these partitions, somewhere I have Fedora, Debian and SUSE installs, I think.