How to add a new hard disk drive to an ubuntu desktop
Posted by Adrian on Dec 5, 2007 in Open Source | 2 commentsMy home PC is an old Dell machine with a 40GB IDE hard drive. Having just bought a new 160GB drive for backups from my laptop, I couldnt work out how to install and configure it in Ubuntu as it dosnt recognise the presence of a new drive on startup.
So, I again used GPARTED , and booted up the machine using GPARTED and formatted the drive that way as a new ext3 format. Now its recognised as a spare disk in /media which works fine.
one final tip for novice users like me, if you want to make a directory to start with and the disk is blank, its esy to to this at the command line when Ubuntu wont let you.
go to ./media/disk directory
sudo mkdir NEWDIRECTORYNAME
chmod 777 NEWDIRECTORYNAME
This is very loose security, but if its just a home PC with no other access I thoguht this would be fine.
I hope this helps someone. If you an expert user and can comment further, please feel free.
Adrian, you could just install GParted on Ubuntu and partition the disk and mount partitions without having to use a livecd. Also if you go back over the notes from the Linux admin course you could do that on the command line using fdisk, mkfs, and editing /etc/fstab (but admittedly that’s more hardcore than just using GParted).
Hi Paul
Thanks for this comment. I tried to do this but after installing it using the add/remove applications it wont start, saying “there are no filesystems which you are allowed to mount/unmount, Contact your administrator”. I thought this was a permissions issue, but there is only 1 user on this installation and I couldnt work out how to run gparted as sudo or root without the command line, which I only wanted to run as a last resort when using fdisk, as there is serious potential for cock ups!
Any further suggestions Paul for myself and other any people who stumble across this thread?
I hope the new job is going well, I read your posts on Android with interest even though its not relevant to us.