I’ve been a system administrator for more than 20 years. While many aspects of the job have stayed pretty much the same, some tasks are now very different from what they previously were. One of the latter is administering disk space. In the past, one had to use a lot of tricks to efficiently manage what was then a very precious commodity. Now however, with the advent of relatively cheap disks, having enough storage space is rarely an issue since adding more disk space is seldom a problem.
I’ve been a system administrator for more than 20 years. While many aspects of the job have stayed pretty much the same, some tasks are now very different from what they previously were. One of the latter is administering disk space. In the past, one had to use a lot of tricks to efficiently manage what was then a very precious commodity. Now however, with the advent of relatively cheap disks, having enough storage space is rarely an issue since adding more disk space is seldom a problem.
This month, we will take an in-depth look at the process of adding an additional disk drive to your system. We’ll begin by summarizing the steps that are involved:
Install the new disk controller (if applicable). Make sure that you have kernel support for the controller (usually via the appropriate kernel module).
Physically attach the disk to the computer system.
Determine (or create) the special files that are associated with the new partitions.
Partition the new disk as desired.
Create filesystems on all of the new partitions.
Check the new filesystems for any consistency errors. This may not be necessary with certain filesystem types.
Mount the new filesystem.
Specify the new filesystem’s boot-time behavior as well as other options in the filesystem configuration file (/etc/fstab).
Perform the appropriate ongoing filesystem management.
In the following sections, we’ll consider each of the above items in turn.
Installing the Hardware
In some cases, you…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
