How to Add Disk to a Linux Machine

After we’ve logged in and accessed a terminal window as root (or another user with root/sudo privs) we first want to run fdisk on the newly created drive. In Linux the first SCSI drive is sda, the second sdb, the third sdc, etc. since this was the second SCSI drive we added to the system, the device is known as /dev/sdb
The first command we want to run is fdisk /dev/sdb To create a new partition we enter the command n to create a new partition. This is going to be a primary partition p, and the first partition number 1. Because I want this disk to consume the full 12 GB I specified earlier we start at the first cylinder and end it at the last cylinder. We then want to write the partition table with the new partition we have just created so we enter the command w which writes the new table and exits fdisk.

Format the partition
Now that we’ve create the partition, we now want to format the first with the new file system. I’ve decided to use ext3 filesystem for this disk, ext3 provides all the features of the classic ext2 file system plus journaling which helps to prevent disk corruption in the event of an improper shutdown and speeds up the recovery process. So, to format the new partition we enter the command mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1. This command makes a new files system with the type t ext3 on the /dev/sdb1 partition, this is the first partition on the sdb disk.

Create the mount point
Determine where you want to add the new virtual disk you’ve created. I like to create a partition specifically for all the software I install after the basic Linux install called /software to do that we run mkdir /software, just a simple make directory command. Once that is complete we then want to mount the newly created partition. Because we haven’t added the partition to the /etc/fstab yet we have to mount it manually. To do that we run mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /software. To break down this command we run mount with the ext3 filesystem type, the partition /dev/sdb1 to the directory /software. Pretty simple and straight forward. To check that the partition is properly mounted we run df -k which shows us the mounted partitions and the amount of available space.

Modify the fstab for the new partition
After we open the fstab file in the previous step we add the following line:
/dev/sdb1 /software ext3 defaults 1 1
The first column is the partition name, the second is the default mount point, the third is the filesystem type. The fourth is the mount options, in this case I used default which mounts the drive rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser and asynchronous. The 5th and 6th options are for the dump and fsck options. If dump is set to 1 the filesystem is marked to be backed up, if you are going to have sensitive material on the drive its a good idea to set it to 1. If fsck is set to greater than 1, then the operating system uses the number to determine in what order fsck should be run during start up. If it is set to 0 it will be ignored such as in the case of a cdrom drive since its a solid state disk.

Quick Reference
1) fdisk /dev/sdb
n
p
1
First cylinder
Last Cylinder
w
2) mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1
3) mkdir /software
4) mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /software
5) Edit fstab

/dev/sdb1 /software ext4 defaults 1 1