We all have some things that we do so very infrequently that we have to go find a guide or walk through in order to figure out how we did, what we did, so long ago. I figure this is as good as a place as any to put some of these hardly needed but oh so valuable reminders.
Inherently Ubuntu will not mount multiple physical hard disk drives, so it takes a little tweaking to get your extra hard drive space to show up, but it really is quite simple and here are the steps; *Note: Guide built for Ubuntu 8.04.
1. Install the new hard disk drive in the computer and ensure that your jumper settings are correct.
2. Boot to Ubuntu and start GParted Partition Editor (System > Administration > Partition Editor).
a. If you don’t have it, install it using the Synaptic Package Manger (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager).
3. Choose the newly installed hard disk from the drop down list on the top-right. Remember that you will be formatting this drive, so make sure you are looking at the correct one!
4. Right click the “unallocated xxx.xx GB” graph and select “New” from the menu.
5. A window will pop-up for setting the disk label, just click “Create”.
6. Confirm by clicking “Create” again.
7. Click “New” – Here you will create a new partition. Use all space, which is default, ensure that it is set as a primary partition and the file system I use is ext3. Now click “Add”.
8. Click the “Apply” button and let the process run. At this point make a note of what your new partition is named. For demonstration purposes we will say that your new drive is named /dev/sdb1. From here on be sure that you change this to reflect what your partition label is.
9. Close GParted.
10. Open Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal).
11. Create the Mount Point by typing:
12. Make a backup copy of your fstab file by typing:
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab-bk
13. Open Gedit to edit the fstab file by typing:
14. Add the below line to the bottom of your ftsab file *Note: Where you see a space below, it is actually a TAB! Do not just cut and past the below:
/dev/sdb1 /hd2 ext3 defaults 0 0
15. Save your changes and close the editor.
16. Re-mount your drives by typing:
17. At this point you can access the new drive by clicking on Places > Computer > Filesystem > hd2. Once you open the hd2 folder you will find that it has X GB of free space, where X is the capacity of your drive.
18. Assign the proper permissions to write to the drive. You need to assign this to a user and for the below example the user name is mike:
sudo chown –R mike:mike /hd2
then type
19. Close Terminal.
You now have full use of your new hard disk drive accessible from a filer within Filesystem called hd2.
Posted by
Mike Wright
