Monday, September 5, 2011

Hardisk Partion Create

Posted by Arun Sawant at 9:41 PM


Q. I've installed a new 250GB SATA hard disk on our office CentOS Linux server. How do I format a hard disk under Linux operating system from a shell prompt?



A.. There are total 4 steps involved for hard disk upgrade and installation procedure:


Step #1 : Partition the new disk using fdisk command


Following command will list all detected hard disks:

# fdisk -l | grep '^Disk'

Output:


Disk /dev/sda: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes

A device name refers to the entire hard disk. For more information see Linux partition naming convention and IDE drive mappings.

To partition the disk - /dev/sdb, enter:

# fdisk /dev/sdb

The basic fdisk commands you need are:



  • m - print help

  • p - print the partition table

  • n - create a new partition

  • d - delete a partition

  • q - quit without saving changes

  • w - write the new partition table and exit


Step#2 : Format the new disk using mkfs.ext3 command


To format Linux partitions using ext2fs on the new disk:

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1


Step#3 : Mount the new disk using mount command


First create a mount point /disk1 and use mount command to mount /dev/sdb1, enter:

# mkdir /disk1

# mount /dev/sdb1 /disk1

# df -H


Step#4 : Update /etc/fstab file


Open /etc/fstab file, enter:

# vi /etc/fstab

Append as follows:


/dev/sdb1               /disk1           ext3    defaults        1 2

Save and close the file.


Task: Label the partition


You can label the partition using e2label. For example, if you want to label the new partition /backup, enter

# e2label /dev/sdb1 /backup

You can use label name insted of partition name to mount disk using /etc/fstab:

LABEL=/backup /disk1 ext3 defaults 1 2


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