Add another Hard Drive to Ubuntu

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Add another Hard Drive to Ubuntu

Add another Hard Drive to Ubuntu
By Brad Trupp (c) 2007

You just picked up that new hard drive at a bargain price and have installed into your Ubuntu box. The bios see it but nothing else does yet.

Install the tools - Gnome Partition Editor

Select Add/Remove... under the Applications menu item to open up the "Add/Remove Applications" window. Type in partition or gparted into the search box, press enter, and see what comes up.

If necessary, change the Show box from "Supported Ubuntu applications" to "All available Applications" and the list should expand. Find ""Gnome Partition Editor"" and select it.

Press the "Apply" button. Up comes a confirmation screen to "Apply the following changes". Press the "Apply" button. You will be prompted for your password to perform administrative tasks. Enter it and away we go. Ubuntu will download and install the necessary files.

Running Gnome Partition Editor

Start up the Gnome Partition Editor. It should be under System / Administration menu.

Select the new drive from the drop down list. It should show all drive space as unallocated. Make sure you are looking at the right drive since there is no going back once you start formatting.

Click on the "unallocated" partition and the "New" icon should become enabled.

Click on "New". First prompt is to set the disklabel on the new device -- in my case /dev/sba -- the first SATA drive, as my boot drive is /dev/hda.

Click on "New" again and the "Create new Partition" dialog appears. Stick with the defaults "Primary Partition" and "ext3".

Click on the "Apply" button, verify that you are serious, and "Apply" to start. The Gnome Partition Editor executes the pending operations and formats the new drive. Once all operations have completed successfully, close the pending operations dialog and close Gnome Partition Editor.

As my drive was /dev/sda, the new partition is /dev/sda1.

I rebooted at this point but it probably is not necessary.

Using the Places / Computer menu, you should see the new volume. Click on it to mount it onto the desktop (as /media/disk). At this point, you should be able to browse the disk but likely have no write access. Right-click and select "Unmount Volume" to unmount it.

Mounting the new Partition

Open a terminal window and enter the following commands --

(1) Create the Mount Point

sudo mkdir /nas2

(2) Back up the /etc/fstab file.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab-backup

(3) Edit the /etc/fstab file and add the new partition to /etc/fstab. Since the file is owned by "root", we need to use sudo to start an editor.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add this line to /etc/fstab. Use tab instead of space to separate the various columns.

/dev/sda1 /nas2 ext3 defaults 0 0

To save your changes, press Control-X for save, Y to confirm, and then press Enter to exit.

(4) We have made changes to the /etc/fstab file, so let ask Ubuntu to mount the drives again

sudo mount -a

(5)Now give ourselves proper permissions to use the new drive. Assume in this example that my userid is "freddie".

sudo chown -R freddie:freddie /nas2
sudo chmod -R 755 /nas2

Now the new drive is mounted as /nas2 and is ready to use.

One more Thing

This article was written using Version 7.04 (April 2007) of Ubuntu.

Things may be different in newer versions.

Also, as a convenience and ease of use, you can also create a symbolic link (using the ln -s command) on your desktop back to the /nas2 folder. Just click on the new link to open the folder in the default file browser.

Tags: Ubuntu

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