Today we are going to mount another hard drive in our server. Currently we have primary hard drive (hda) on which operating system is installed. We need another hard disk to maintain backups or any other data. Mounting hard disk is easy task if we know the exact steps. I am going to demonstrate how to mount another hard disk, other than hda(Master IDE), on server:

1. You need root privileges for mounting hard disk to server. Login using root credentials, if you already logged in, switch to root using ‘su –‘ command.

2. Next step is to verify the hard disk need to installed/mount on server. You can check this using fdisk on server shell.

You will get output similar to this:

Here you can see 80GB hard drive (hdc) listed in output.

3. Once you identified second hard disk next step is to initialized and partitioned it using the following commands:

Now your new hard disk with a partition is ready. Next step is to format this newly created disk/partition to use it.

4. Format the disk using with your favorite file system. I am using ext3 file-system for my tutorial.

This will format your drive with ext3 file system.

5. Now create the mount point where you want to mount your hard disk. Without mounting you can’t use it.

6. Do not forget to make entry in fstab so that it will be automatically mounted after rebooted. Open fstab file in your favorite editor perform the following steps to permanent mount your newly created hard disk. I am using vi editor:

Add the following line at the end of the file:

If you are not comfortable with editors, you can also make the above entry from shell directly using the following command:

Now save and quit from the file. You are all done with modification to add new hard disk.
Please do comments and give your feedback.