How to mount and unmount a drive in Linux – How to Add a New Disk to an Existing Linux Server

How To Mount A Drive In Linux

This simple step by step guide will show you how to mount a new hard drive or partitions onto your Linux server

Initially you wanna check the hard drives on your system

fdisk -l

so now you now whats being seen by the system

The mounting point path must already be created with proper permissions. So a more likely flow of commands would be below:

How To Unmount A Drive In Linux

This command is very easy to type wrong. It is NOT unmount. Take another closer look if thats what you saw at first. It is umount — no n here!

How to Add a New Disk to an Existing Linux Server

fdisk is a command line utility to view and manage hard disks and partitions on Linux systems.

# fdisk -l

This will list the current partitions and configurations.

After attaching the hard disk of 20GB capacity, the fdisk -l will give the below output.

New disk added is shown as /dev/xvdc. If we are adding physical disk it will show as /dev/sda based of the disk type. Here I used a virtual disk.

To partition a particular hard disk, for example /dev/xvdc.

# fdisk /dev/xvdc

Commonly used fdisk commands.

n – Create partition
p – print partition table
d – delete a partition
q – exit without saving the changes
w – write the changes and exit.

Here since we are creating a partition use n option.

Create either primary/extended partitions. By default we can have upto 4 primary partitions.

Give the partition number as desired. Recommended to go for the default value 1.

Give the value of the first sector. If it is a new disk, always select default value. If you are creating a second partition on the same disk, we need to add 1 to the last sector of the previous partition.

Give the value of the last sector or the partition size. Always recommended to give the size of the partition. Always prefix + to avoid value out of range error.

Save the changes and exit.

Now format the disk with mkfs command.

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdc1

Once formatting has been completed, now mount the partition as shown below.

# mount /dev/xvdc1 /data

Make an entry in /etc/fstab file for permanent mount at boot time.

/dev/xvdc1	/data	ext4	defaults     0   0

Conclusion