How to format and mount a second harddrive in the Ubuntu shell
I just had to format and mount a second HD in a Ubuntu system.
Through various tutorials I was able to piece things together.
In my case I knew from the specs of the host of the dedicated server that there should be a second RAID1 SAS system using two 500GB drives but when using saidar to check the system I could only see the primary SATA RAID running the Ubuntu system itself.
So my conclusion was that the second drive wasn’t setup properly but how to do this in the terminal? Normally I’ve only had to do this on local machines where I have access to various GUI interfaces which makes things easier.
First of all we need to check what the drive is called, for instance with fdisk -l.
From the output I got when I ran the above command I could see that the drive was /dev/sdb in my case.
Next it was time to run fdisk /dev/sdb.
Here is my history from doing that:
# fdisk /dev/sdb
WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to
switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to
sectors (command 'u').
Command (m for help): u
Changing display/entry units to sectors
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First sector (63-974608383, default 63): 63
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (63-974608383, default 974608383): 974608383
Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): L
0 Empty 24 NEC DOS 81 Minix / old Lin bf Solaris
1 FAT12 39 Plan 9 82 Linux swap / So c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
2 XENIX root 3c PartitionMagic 83 Linux c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 40 Venix 80286 84 OS/2 hidden C: c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 41 PPC PReP Boot 85 Linux extended c7 Syrinx
5 Extended 42 SFS 86 NTFS volume set da Non-FS data
6 FAT16 4d QNX4.x 87 NTFS volume set db CP/M / CTOS / .
7 HPFS/NTFS 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 88 Linux plaintext de Dell Utility
8 AIX 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 8e Linux LVM df BootIt
9 AIX bootable 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba e1 DOS access
a OS/2 Boot Manag 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 94 Amoeba BBT e3 DOS R/O
b W95 FAT32 52 CP/M 9f BSD/OS e4 SpeedStor
c W95 FAT32 (LBA) 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux a0 IBM Thinkpad hi eb BeOS fs
e W95 FAT16 (LBA) 54 OnTrackDM6 a5 FreeBSD ee GPT
f W95 Ext'd (LBA) 55 EZ-Drive a6 OpenBSD ef EFI (FAT-12/16/
10 OPUS 56 Golden Bow a7 NeXTSTEP f0 Linux/PA-RISC b
11 Hidden FAT12 5c Priam Edisk a8 Darwin UFS f1 SpeedStor
12 Compaq diagnost 61 SpeedStor a9 NetBSD f4 SpeedStor
14 Hidden FAT16 <3 63 GNU HURD or Sys ab Darwin boot f2 DOS secondary
16 Hidden FAT16 64 Novell Netware af HFS / HFS+ fb VMware VMFS
17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 65 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fc VMware VMKCORE
18 AST SmartSleep 70 DiskSecure Mult b8 BSDI swap fd Linux RAID auto
1b Hidden W95 FAT3 75 PC/IX bb Boot Wizard hid fe LANstep
1c Hidden W95 FAT3 80 Old Minix be Solaris boot ff BBT
1e Hidden W95 FAT1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 83
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!
Fairly straightforward, after that it was time to format the drive with ext4, like this: mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1.
It was time to mount it, first I created a directory to mount it in: mkdir /sdb.
After that I added it to my /etc/fstab file:
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
.
.
.
/dev/sdb1 /sdb ext3 defaults 1 1
Finally a mount /sdb did the trick!
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Tags: ext3, fdisk, filesystem, format, fstab, harddrive, hd, Linux, mkfs, ubuntu