Guide to add a new drive partition to an existing system

Suppose that you are obliged to create a partition of 10 GB on your server running Linux, you have two options:

• Create a partition of unpartitioned space on your machine or
• Add a new disc drive.

If you opt for the latter, it is a simple matter of connecting the new disc, allowing the system to detect, through a partitioning tool to create the necessary partitions, formatting the newly created partition and finally mounting. But if it is the former namely, the creation of a partition of the non-partitioned space, the task becomes a little more difficult.

Joey Prestia explains the steps necessary to add a new partition to an existing system. The task can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Determine what partitions must be created and where.
2. Create partitions (I use fdisk here, but Linux partitioning tool should work)
3. Re-read the partition table with either "partprobe" or by a reboot
4. Make a file system on the partition, label and create mount points
5. Add the entries in "/etc/fstab" so that the partitions are mounted on restarting

See Joey notes to know exactly the commands used to accomplish the above tasks.

♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves