partitioning ext drive

[betty]

hi eric;
thank you for your response; i'm just now able to get back to this 
drive; i am running redhat 9.0

df command does not show the ext drive only hda1,2, etc

i followed your advice and made these commands to 1- make sure the sda 
was not mounted and 2 put the space in before the /dev in the fdisk 
command. here is the output

[root at bigdog root]# umount /dev/sdb
umount: /dev/sdb: not mounted
[root at bigdog root]# fdisk /dev/sdb
bash: fdisk: command not found

so i did a "man fdisk" without the quotes, and all the appropriate 
how-to's on fdisk came up.
?
thanks for your patience.

i will copy the previous email below in case you didn't recall them, but 
not to jumble up the above.
-- 
betty i.
www.WebCanine.com
research & information
for people who care for dogs

===================================================
betty wrote:

 >> answer to questions;
 >> yes, that drive already has 3 partitions on it, but i assume i am going
 >> to be deleting them, that is fine, they are an old redhat that i'm not
 >> using now. now i am using redhat 9.0. yes, it is attached by a usb.
 >>
 >> although the gui says that the the drive is /dev/sdb , when i try to 
use
 >> fdisk/dev/sdb i get this;
 >>
 >> [root at bigdog /]# fdisk/dev/sdb
 >> bash: fdisk/dev/sdb: No such file or directory


The shell (bash) is telling you that it can't find the command sdb in
the fdisk/dev (relative to the current) folder. Of course it can't.
That command should be fdisk <space> /dev/sdb


 >>
 >>  when i looked in /dev, sure enough there was no /sdb
 >> there are a lot of /sdbr, /sdbs, /sdbt, etc but no just plain sdb's.


That's a different problem. What distro are you running?


 >> there is an sdb in mnt


That is where the drive would be mounted.


 >> [root at bigdog mnt]# ls
 >> cdrom  flash  floppy  sdb
 >>
 >> so i thought i'd try the command from mnt but i got:
 >>
 >> [root at bigdog mnt]# fdisk/sdb
 >> bash: fdisk/sdb: No such file or directory


Two things wrong with this. First is, like above, you need a space after
fdisk. Second is, you never want to modify partitions while they're mounted!

What does the 'df' command show you?


 >> sooo, how can that be? i thought i was on a roll.... :\
 >>
 >> how can it be in the gui as /dev/sdb but not in the command line when i
 >> LS under dev ????


Not sure about that.


-- -Eric 'shubes'