Linux Storage Management (Part 1) : Adding A New Disk And Creating A Partition With df And fdisk

 In the previous post we used the df and fdisk commands to gather storage information about our Linux system.  In this post we are going to add a new disk and partition to our system.  I am using VBox and you can create a new storage by going to settings and adding a new disk, it will be just like adding a real physical disk on a physical machine except it's virtual.  You can go to this post if you want to know how to do it

Here are the steps to adding a new disk and creating a partition for the disk:

1. First we want to see what the new disk is identified as in our Linux system, we can do that by typing the command fdisk -l

As you can see the new disk is identified as /dev/sdb and it has 8 GB which is correct

2. We want to go into the fdisk utility to work with our new disk, to do that you type fdisk /dev/sdb then press enter

3. Press m to see all the options that are available

From the help menu we know that we have to use the n option to add a new partition

4. Type n and then press Enter to get into the create partition steps

5. You will be given a choice of the partition being a primary or extended, since this is a new disk we want to make it a primary partition, so press p and ENTER

6. For the partition number accept the default 1 by pressing ENTER, once again it's a new disk so it's going to be the first partition on the disk

7. Accept the default again for the first sector by pressing ENTER

8. Accept the default again by pressing ENTER, if you want to create more than one partition and not use the entire disk you enter the size so that there's disk space left like this +4G, and it would use only 4 GB for the partition, but since we want to use the entire disk we just going to press ENTER

A new partition has been created for the new disk.  Or have you? A lot of beginners forget to do the next step and the partition is not created even though they went to through all the steps. The final step to the process is that you have to type w to write your changes else nothing will happen.  It's just a confirmation that fdisk needs, for you to confirm that the changes are correct in the final step.

 In the next post we are going to mount the partition and create a filesystem for the new partition.