Debian: Add HDD

I have an torrenting system where I just toss in obsolete items. The OS is Debian sarge. I am adding a 16GB harddrive soon. I am not new to linux but I have never added in hardware without doing a fresh install. However, the system is just how I want it so I don't want to format now.

Right now the system is just one 20GB partition for everything.

I want to add in this new drive as a slave IDE. How do I format it, get it to automount, etc?

If possible, can I merge this drive without using any RAID solution, I'd rather have a 36GB drive than a 20GB and 16GB partition. I just want to somehow have a large contigous space for torrents to save in during downloading.

fdisk $DEVICE (obtain from dmesg|less)
mkfs{ext3,reiserfs,whatever}
add an entry to /etc/fstab for the device.

Alternately:
Use XP
Problem solved.

>>If possible, can I merge this drive without using any RAID solution, I'd rather have a 36GB drive than a 20GB and 16GB partition.

look into "logical volume management."

>>2
XP is not an elegant solution for a headless box of near obsolete equipment.

>>3
I have installed lvm via apt. Now I just have to use a liveCD to resize my boot partition and create the LVM volumes. I hope things work out since I'm kludging along with minimal documentation.

>>4

I hope things dont work out, I anticipate >>6 or >>7 to be funny.

>>5
You evil, evil man.

Good thing I have lots of backups.

(Power goes out while resizing my root partition.)

>>6 is not funny.

>>1 unfortunately you can't merge them without at least complete backupping. you would have to set up a sw-raid, change 2,3 config files and restore the data (the whole root-directory)  with a linux-livecd on the raid. it wouldn't be that hard though. if you really want to do that we might help you.

it *might* work with something like unionfs, but it'll be more like an ugly hack.

i suggest just mounting the hdd somewhere.

>>7

We established long ago that LVM can do what he wants just fine. Please keep up.

>>6
I am OP, and that was me. The power didnt go out (I was joking) but I did screw up my system. Maybe I was just impatient but the resizer hung for about an hour with no HDD activity so I killed it and started a fresh install of Debian.

The nice thing with Debian is I just choose what I want in the installer and then drop in my backed up config files and everything is working again.

The installer also had a LVM setup so I got that working as well.

It's a happy ending. Thanks guys.