I recently bought a new SATA hdd and have it connected to my fedora 12 box. Since its a raw disk i have no clue of how to use it. It doesn't get mounted on start up and i don't know how to mount it. Can someone guide me how to do following things.
1. Format it to ntfs
2. mount it.
Also I don't have any windows on my box. Any help please....
When you say "format it" you mean "make a filesystem on it".
To do this in windows, it required the "format.exe" command, but now it can be done in Disk Administrator under Win2000/XP etc.
To put a NTFS filesystem on it requires Windows, unfortunately. You could fire up a windows image in a virtual machine, but there aren't[1] any commands under Linux that can make a NTFS filesystem on it.
To put a Linux-based filesystem on it is the "mkfs" command. Choices are EXT3 and EXT4 for Fedora12. Once that's done, the "mount" command will be used to bring it online. Adding an entry to the /etc/fstab file means it comes online automatically at boot-time.
I haven't gone into the details of exactly how the commands work here (the MAN pages should tell you some information, as well as some searches here) - but I'm interested to know why you want to use NTFS on that disk.
[1] to my knowledge - I could be wrong.
Apparently, there is mkfs.ntfs in Fedora, which should allow you to do this.
However, if you plan to access this disk from your Linux installation you should use a filesystem that is more Linux native. So to reiterate Dave, is there a particular reason you want to use NTFS on the drive?