Need help with new internal hard drive

General system Newbie
1

I want to use an internal hard drive as a folder for backing up images and files. I’m using Dolphin. Here’s the lsblk:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1G 0 part /efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 930.5G 0 part /

What are the steps I need to take to format/partition to use this drive? There isn’t a partition or FSTYPE when I look at it with lsblk -fm.

Also something that’s been bugging me separately; is my partitioning okay? Is 1 Gig enough room for EndeavourOS in the long term? Should I make a separate partition for Home or is the way it is set up currently okay? Sorry for so many questions.

2

That appears to be you main OS partition. If you format it, you will erase the OS.

That is the EFI partition. 1GB is plenty big for that.

Your OS is installed in 930GB partition.

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3

To clarify, you have a 2nd 1.8TB drive, sda, that you’d like to partition and use for backup?

You can install partitionmanager, a KDE tool for managing and formatting drives and partitions.

sudo pacman -S partitionmanager
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4

Yes, it’s the 1.8TB sda that I want to use. Will I still have to manually create a mount point in the fstab file if I use the partition manager or will it make one automatically?

5

You have the ability to right-click a not-yet-mounted partition and “Edit Mount Point”, which will add it to fstab :+1:

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I won’t nuke or format the nvmes haha I know enough not to do that. I just meant if my current partition sizes were good enough and if I should make a seperate partition for home or keep it as is. Thank you for answering.

7

I’ll install the partition manager and do this tomorrow and follow up if it worked. I’ll mark this as the solution if it does. Thank you.

Just to clarify I should add a new partition to the sda and then edit mount point? Nothing else I need to do?

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Should the path be set to the fstab file? Do I need to make it UUID or anything else?

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9

The “valid path” just needs to be the mount point. For example, I have an 8TB SSD that holds all my steam games. I formatted it for btrfs using KDE Partition Manager, and then edited the mount point. I used “/mnt/games”. If selecting “Don’t prevent the system from booting if not mountable” that must means the bootup won’t puke if not auto-mounted. I DEF recommend the “No Update of file / directory access times”. That’ll avoid unnecessary writes.

You’ll get an “are you sure you want to overwrite FSTAB?” I hate that message, it does NOT overwrite, it just appends it. So ignore that warning.

Then, when you reboot, it’ll automatically mount in the future.

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10

Thank you, this cleared it up for me and I made a new folder in my home that mounts to the drive.

One thing I’m confused about is a folder called Lost and found in there. This drive is new so should I just delete that or is it important? I checked inside and there isn’t anything there.

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11

Sounds like that drive is formatted ext4? “Lost & Found” is a directory that, when the filesystem is checked, if it finds missing fragments from files, it puts them there. Think of “chkdsk /f” in Windows or DOS. If it finds lost clusters (meaning pieces of a file not attached to anything), it’ll put them there. And yes, it is extremely rare to see anything there. :slight_smile: I THINK, if you delete the directory, it’ll just re-create it. I THINK :slight_smile:

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I’ll leave it then, just got worried that maybe the drive wasn’t shredded properly when it had Windows.

Thank you guys for the help. I’ll make Blinks answer the solution but I want to thank you too for the help with the folders and mount points. All of you guys have a great day!

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