Howto Add Second Harddisk in UBUNTU

This Guide iwll show you how to add second harddrive to your Ubuntu box.
(since I was running out of space for my squid cache server, I decided to add new harddrive to add more capacity for cache, therefore I wrote this article, so it may be helpful for any one)

After pluggin in new HDD to ubuntu box,  go into your computer’s BIOS and make sure it is detected there properly.

From ubuntu  command prompt , (root access is must) issue the following command.

fdisk -l
It will show two harddrive,
SDA as your primary harddisk,
SDB as your newly added Secondary Harddisk

As shown in the image below . .

If, on the other hand, there is already data on your new hard drive,(you will see the partitions).

Now we need to create partitions on this newly added harddrive. Issue the following command to execute the FDISK procedure.

fdisk /dev/sdb

Type  ‘u‘    & press Enter

To create new partition in new hdd,
Type  ‘n‘    & press Enter

To select partition type as primary,
Type ‘p‘    & press Enter

To select partition number,
Type ‘1‘    & press Enter

To write changes to disk partition,
Finally press ‘w‘    & press Enter

As shown in the image below . .

Now the partition is created , We need to run partprobe to update the kernel with the changes we have made with the following command

partprobe /dev/sdb

Next, we need to format our new hard drive. To do this, enter the following command,

mkfs /dev/sdb -t ext4

and Press  ‘y‘ to Continue

As shown in the image below . .

As now the partition is ready to be used , but we have to first mount it any folder.

Create an folder name 2nd-hdd in /mnt by following command,

mkdir /mnt/2nd-hdd

Allow Permission to make this folder writable for every one.

chmod 777 /mnt/2nd-hdd

As shown in the image below . .

Now mount it by using following command

mount /dev/sdb /mnt/2nd-hdd/

To see its content , issue the following command

ls /mnt/2nd-hdd

Now we need to add the following  entry in /etc/fstab so that this newly added harddrive  mount on every reboot auto, Edit /etc/fstab by following command

nano /etc/fstab

Now add the following line at end.

/dev/sdb /mnt/2nd-hdd auto defaults 0 0

As shown in the image below . .

Now either reboot your ubuntu box or issue the following command to mount new harddrive in /mnt/2nd-hdd

mount -a

To test your new harddrive , try creating any file in /mnt/2nd-hdd by following command

touch /mnt/2nd-hdd/my 2nd hdd

As shown in the image below . .

Regard’s
SYED JAHANZAIB