How do I add an additional hard drive?
I am mosting likely to place an added (non - USB) hard drive in my system. I currently have Ubuntu on my various other hard drive so I do not intend to install Ubuntu on the added drive yet just utilize it for storage space. Just how do I add the added hard drive to my Ubuntu system, as an example make Ubuntu identify it and also place it effectively?
There is an excellent summary just how to add an additional drive here:
Basically you need to dividing the new disk, create a documents system on it and afterwards place it. Thats is the very easy means. An additional means would certainly be to make use of lvm and also create digital disks on the new drive. That would certainly offer you extra flexibility:
1 Partition
The easiest and user-friendly way is probably to use gparted
after you have installed your new HDD and boot your machine:
sudo gparted
Then you create partitions, by setting their size and type.
- If a partition table does not exist yet, you likely want to choose the type as
gpt
for Ubuntu-only machines andmsdos
(aka MBR) for dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows machines. See this forum post for additional discussion - Since your hard drive is additional storage space, you probably want to create one single big partition with the type of
ext4
- After adding the new partition, make sure that the left-most partition column shows a true filepath (i.e.
/dev/sdb1
) rather than a placeholder like "New partition #1". If you see the latter, click "Edit > Apply all operations" from the top-bar to actually execute the new partition. Otherwise, it is just in a pending state and your mount will fail in step 2.3
gparted
is a very easy to use tool, and yet very advanced.
2 Mount
After you are done creating your partitions (most likely it will be just one ext4
data partition, since this is your additional storage drive), you need to permanently mount it.
At this step you already know what names your new partition(-s) have. If not sure, following command will remind you about existing drives and partitions on them:
sudo fdisk -l
This will output something like this (intentionally skipped /dev/sda
system drive info):
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
....
Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000814e3
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id Syste
/dev/sdb1 1 243201 1953512001 83 Linux
Output states, that your new partition is /dev/sdb1
. Now you need to mount it to utilize it's precious space. To achieve this, you need to perform three simple steps:
2.1 Create a mount point
sudo mkdir /hdd
2.2 Edit /etc/fstab
Open /etc/fstab
file with root
permissions:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
And add following to the end of the file:
/dev/sdb1 /hdd ext4 defaults 0 0
2.3 Mount partition
Last step and you're done!
sudo mount /hdd
Links
- fdisk partitioning tutorial, command line alternative.
- GParted tutorial.
Related questions