Problems adding a Hard Drive

[Dave]

Folks,

Obviously I'm new at this and still am having problems adding a hard drive to use as file storage.

I have setup a 16Gig CF card as the OS drive. It has Ubuntu 12.04LTS server in the root logical volume (about 12gig) and a swap_1 logical volume (about 2gig). I want this CF card to be just the OS and boot, as I do not want to store any user files on it.

So I then install the 1TB drive (a WD black) to be used for user files, reboot, and attempt to follow the 'Configure the server' - 'Partition drives' and it's 'How to add additional drives'.

Using Webmin I get through it to the mount point and select the drive with the 'Partition with ID' option and it appears to work.

Yet when I go to the 'Hardware' 'Logical Volume Managament' screen the new drive or it's space does not show up at all. Just the root and swap_1 logical volumes with their original sizes of 12 and 2gig. Also the drive is not listed as available to select as a 'Physical Volume' either.

It seems to me that the drive or it's space somehow needs to be added to the volume management and this is where I am lost.

I did make sure that when I added the drive to be sure to select 'Linux Native (ext3)' through out whenever it was an option.

Apparently I am doing something wrong, but what, I'm not sure.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dave

[ricksebak]

I don't know anything about webmin, but if you want to use LVM with the new drive you would probably want to create a new physical volume. This page shows how to do that: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/how-to-create-lvm/

If you don't really care about LVM then you just need to run "fdisk /dev/sdb", "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1", "mount /dev/sdb1 /path/to/mountpoint". Obviously you would use the actual names of your disks and partitions if it's something other than /dev/sdb[1], etc. This link has a more step-by-step breakdown: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialAdditionalHardDrive.html.

If you aren't sure if you should care about LVM or not, here is an example of how you might use it. Suppose you have your drive mounted as /home/yourname/mediafiles. And then you max out that drive by storing a ton of media. With LVM, you could just add another drive to the volume group, and you've got more space. The files in that directory might be stored across a bunch of physical disks, but with only one mount point. You don't have to know or care which specific disks each file is on. You just look in /home/yourname/mediafiles and all your media is there.

The downside of that (I think) is that if one of your drives crashes, the whole volume group can be compromised. So I wouldn't use the above scenario unless you had really good backups or you didn't care if you lost your media.

If you've only got one disk, and that's all you will ever have, there's probably no good reason to use LVM.

[Dave]

@ricksebak,

I appreciate your response, both sites are ones I have not seen and seem to be written so us new to all this can make sense of it. Got some reading to do.

Thanks

Dave

[SergeantBort]

Hopefully you have figured this one out by now.

But some tips if you haven't or for future.

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sudo blkid

That will pull a list of all the drives that your system can see (if you have been able to format the new drive)

At that point make note of the UUID

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sudo vim /etc/fstab

This is where you will go to mount the drive on boot, and using the UUID there to mount it makes things easier.

For example

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#Media Backup
UUID=0E78924603C65D8C /mnt/media ntfs users,defaults   0   0

Is how I mounted my 2tb media storage drive on my server, UUID is found from blkid, /mnt/media is where I want the hdd to appear in my local file system, ntfs is the file system of the drive, user, defaults 0 0 makes it available to anyone who is on the network.