Add a drive

From Bitpost wiki

To add a new drive, first SEE WHAT YOU HAVE and make note of it! You don't want to pick the wrong drive to format.  :-)

su -
df
blkid
# choose gpt format
parted /dev/sdf mklabel gpt
# create primary partition, filling all space
parted -a opt /dev/sdf mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
# format as ext4
# for data drives only: use [-m 0], it's very important; without it, goofy ext4 wastes 5% "saved for root" wtf
mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -L hare-s3-4t /dev/sdf1
  1. mount /dev/sdf1 /somewhere # make sure it looks good!
  2. install smartctl tools
smartctl -c /dev/sdf # to peek at available tests and how long they typically take to run
smartctl -t short /dev/sdf
watch -n 3 smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdf # until success, takes about 1 minute
  1. if you're feeling ambitious, rerun with [-t long]
  2. umount # we are NOT going to be manually mounting! we need to label the drive and put it in /etc/fstab
  3. emacs /etc/fstab - and put in an entry like this:
LABEL=hare-s3-4t /spiceflow/hare-s3-4t ext4 noatime 0 0
  1. mount /my-mount-location # now it will be there when you reboot! but do this to get it NOW :-)
  2. Note that if you mount the new drive under /spiceflow, samba will already be serving it up, whoop!


OLD To add a new drive using fdisk (these steps didn't work when drive >2TB):

  1. ls /dev/sd* # and make note of what you have
  2. plug the new drive into a SATA socket
  3. ls /dev/sd* # you should now see something new, like [/dev/sdf]
  4. or do: cat /var/log/messages|grep sd # to see what it used
  5. fdisk looks good again...
fdisk /dev/sdg
p # to show what is there already, hopefully nothing
(d if needed to delete existing partitions)
n # new
  1 # partition 1
  <enter> # for default of 2048
  <enter> # for default, end of drive
  w # write and quit
  1. format: mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/sdf1 # the [-m 0] is very important; without it, goofy ext4 wastes 5% "saved for root" wtf
  2. e2label /dev/sdb1 box-type-sizename # what a stupid f'in name for that util