Install Hard Drive on Linux via Terminal

Introduction

In some scenarios, we will have to install a new hard drive on a computer with Linux system without graphical user interface.

In this blog post, I quickly documented the installation protocol of a new hard drive using commands on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Installation Protocol

Determine Drive Information

Once we have plugin the new hard drive to the computer, we have to first determine the logical name of the drive.

$ sudo lshw -C disk
  *-disk                    
       description: ATA Disk
       product: Samsung SSD 850
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: 2B6Q
       serial: S2RANX0HA26171R
       size: 465GiB (500GB)
       capacity: 465GiB (500GB)
       capabilities: 15000rpm gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
       configuration: ansiversion=6 guid=19af133c-b0ce-45ab-ab5d-9f3d22a9e606 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
  *-disk
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: 2115
       vendor: ASMT
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@9:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdb
       version: 0
       serial: EF9987654321
       size: 931GiB (1TB)
       configuration: ansiversion=6 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
  *-cdrom
       description: DVD-RAM writer
       product: CDDVDW SU-208GB
       vendor: hp
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@5:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/cdrw
       logical name: /dev/dvd
       logical name: /dev/dvdrw
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: HN00
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc

In my case, the new hard drive is the 1TB hard drive and its logical name is /dev/sdb.

We could also query the type of the hard drive using the following command.

$ cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational
1

Here, 1 means HDD and 0 means SSD.

Command Line Partitioning

The next step is to partition the hard drive. I never partition the hard drive into multiple partitions unless it is very necessary. So I partition the entire entire hard drive as one partition.

$ sudo parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) unit TB
(parted) mkpart                                                           
Partition name?  []? panda
File system type?  [ext2]? ext4
Start? 0                                                                  
End? 1                                                                    
(parted) print                                                            
Model: ASMT 2115 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1.00TB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name   Flags
 1      0.00TB  1.00TB  1.00TB  ext4         panda

(parted) quit                                                             
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

Once it is done, we could confirm the partitions of the disk using the following command.

$ lsblk                                                   
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT                                                
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk                                              
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi                                    
└─sda2   8:2    0 465.3G  0 part /                                            
sdb      8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk                                              
└─sdb1   8:17   0 931.5G  0 part                                              
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom                                               

We could see that the only partition for our new hard drive is sdb1.

Command Line Formatting

The next step is to format the partitions. This can be done easily using the following command. Make sure the device partition name is the desired one.

$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Creating filesystem with 244175218 4k blocks and 61046784 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 39f29f93-9289-47d2-9004-b9b5583567ba
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
        102400000, 214990848

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (262144 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Mount Hard Drive File System

So far we have prepared a new hard drive with partitions. However, its file system is not visible on our operating system because it has not been mounted. To mount the new hard drive file system, we have to create an empty directory for mounting first.

$ sudo mkdir /media/panda

To mount and unmount manually, we could run the following commands.

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/panda/
$ df -h | grep /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1       916G   77M  870G   1% /media/panda

$ sudo umount /media/panda
$ df -h | grep /dev/sdb1

To automatically mount the new hard drive file system, we have to edit the /etc/fstab file.

We add the following line to the /etc/fstab file.

/dev/sdb1    /media/panda   ext4    defaults     0        2

To know what exactly those values means in the /etc/fstab file, please check fstab.

To activate the mounting immediately without rebooting the computer, we could run the following command.

$ sudo mount -a
$ sudo umount /media/panda
$ df -h | grep /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1       916G   77M  870G   1% /media/panda

Add Write Privilege

With the settings mentioned above, we could read the data from the new hard drive, and write to the new hard drive with sudo. To add write privilege to user, we could run the following command.

# sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /media/panda
$ sudo chown -R leimao:leimao /media/panda

Quick Test

We could run a quick read and write test on the new hard drive.

$ echo "Hello Underworld!" > /media/panda/hello.txt
$ cat /media/panda/hello.txt
Hello Underworld!
$ rm /media/panda/hello.txt

References

• Installing A New Hard Drive