Adding a new drive from the command line

Proven on:

	11 (bullseye)	(This includes LMDE5, Proxmox, OMV...)
A little note about typographic conventions you'll see here

Connect the drive

Either plug the drive into the machine with the power off or hot-swap it in if possible...

(Yes...  Adding a new drive to an ESXi or Proxmox VM is just like hot-swapping.)

Determine the device

• sudo fdisk -l

fdisk -l example

fdisk is a dialog-driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables.

• man fdisk
  • for details...

You'll see a fair bit of output.

• Blocks starting with Disk /dev/sd_: indicate drives and provide details about them.
• Blocks starting with Device Boot Start... indicate partitions on those drives.
• In the case of an unformatted new drive, you'll see a Disk block that's not followed by a Device block. Make note of it's name (/dev/sd_)
• In our example, it's /dev/sdb

If your drive is previously used

• sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
  • g
    • To create a new empty GPT partition table
  • w
    • To write the partition table to the drive.

Partition the drive

For now, we'll just make the new drive one partition.

• sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
  • n
    • To create a new partition
  • p
    • To make it a primary partition
  • Hit Enter
    • 3 times to pick the default values.
  • w
    • To write the partition table to the drive.

Format the drive

Of course, the drive needs to be formatted before you can use it.

We'll go with Ext4 for now.

• sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

A Little Note: You can actually format the whole drive without partitioning it.

Label the drive

In order to make handling drives a little easier, it is often useful to give partitions human-readable names.

• sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 VOLUME-LABEL

Will label the partition we've been working with as VOLUME-LABEL. Now, any time you want to work with it using utilities that support labels, it'll be easier to keep track of which drive you're referring to.

Mount the drive

Create a mount point for the drive:

• sudo mkdir /MOUNTPOINT

& mount it for use:

• sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /MOUNTPOINT

If you labelled it, you can mount by label:

• sudo mount -L VOLUME-LABEL /MOUNTPOINT

Make the mounting automatic

• sudo vi /etc/fstab

& add the line:

/dev/sdb1      /MOUNTPOINT      ext4   defaults      0      0

or, by label:

LABEL=VOLUME-LABEL      /MOUNTPOINT      ext4   defaults      0      0

Some Links

• Tecmint tutorial: How to Add a New Disk to an Existing Linux Server
• LinuxConfig: How to label a partition or volume on Linux with e2label
• How to Change Linux Partition Label Names on EXT4 / EXT3 / EXT2 and Swap
• Linux Remove All Partitions / Data And Create Empty Disk