Setting up a secondary drive

General system Newbie
1

Hello,

I need help in setting up a secondary drive to an existing system. My current set up is just on a single SSD with a boot partition and everything else stuffed into another partition. I have an HDD that I’d like to use for big games I’m gonna play like once, maybe install VMs and have some extra storage.

I’d like a set up akin to Windows, where it’s just a separate chonker of a drive that’s automatically mounted and you can do whatever you want with it. Kind of like an extension to your current system.

Cheers.

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I would just add it to /etc/fstab

You could mount it as /data or anything else you prefer.

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I do it like that:

  1. Connect drive
  2. Open program like KDE Partition manager or GParted
  3. Choose your disk, create GPT table and format disk to ext4 or whatever you choose
  4. If everything is ok you’ll see this disk in your file manager, open it and launch terminal from root of that disk
  5. Run
    sudo chown $USER:$USER .
  6. Now if you run:
    ls -ld
    It should be something like
    drwxr-xr-x 30 x133 x133 4096 jul 22 23:37 .

From now you can just use / mount your drive however you want.

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I very recently did more or less the same thing. I did my install on one nvme drive and just moved my home dir onto a separate, bigger ssd drive. There are lots of guides for this online, such as:

I did all of the partitioning with GParted, but that article has details on the fstab stuff and other commands that are used.

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I also recently installed another drive. I used gparted and formatted as ext4 and I could then see it and add files to it.

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I’m unsure what any of this means or does.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to add it to /etc/fstab like @dalto mentioned? Though I don’t know what options to use.

As well as a separate weird thing, is that after partitioning my drive with fdisk, it displays my partition as 931gb, but after formatting it with mkfs and mounting it, it displays 869gb. :thinking:

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Those commands is just to own disk by your current user, but you know…That’s just me)
I do those because when you format disk by default it’s root:root which is not very handy for data-disks

Well yeah, if question was about just mount - then of course it’s easier @dalto will help with options but in general it should be kinda like root partition i think, just change disk UUID and mount point :slight_smile:

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Ah, I see. so I open the terminal where the drive is currently mounted and simply do a sudo chown user:user?

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Please copy command exactly, with dot at the end:

sudo chown $USER:$USER .

But yes, pretty much, and then check if

ls -ld

output as your user

$USER is just enviroment variable for your user, at least with bash it is:

echo "$USER"

For example should output it

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Oooh, for some reason I thought I had to manually enter my user lol.

ls -ld now shows it’s my drive.

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btw, to find you disk UUID for /etc/fstab use:

lsblk -f

or

sudo blkid | grep "UUID="
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Yup, looked that up a while ago.

For options and rest, I’m looking at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab and the ones that make sense are rw, user and exec?

So a line in fstab should look like for example:

UUID=whateverismydrive /hdd ext4 rw,user,exec 0 0

Please correct me before I do something dumb lol.

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This is what i have in fstab for an ext4 partition mounted at /Data
UUID=xxxxxxx /Data ext4 defaults,noatime 0 0

rw, exec are included in defaults
user is needed if there are other users in the system than yourself and they are to be able to mount the partition.

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Not sure…I’d say more like:

UUID=whateverismydrive /hdd              ext4    defaults,noatime 0 2

defaults is advisable in general, noatime is best for performance,
for the rest i have no idea to be honest, better wait for @dalto or @Kresimir :upside_down_face:

P.S. yep, @pebcak is right, to quote man fstab

defaults
use default options: rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async.

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I’m wary of using defaults because it includes nouser and keybreak already helped me out with making the drive for my user.

I guess I’d like to keep it minimal and understand what’s going on.

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Makes sense for full-control paranoia mode, since :alien: can change defaults silently… :laughing:

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Or you know, never bother kind strangers about this ever again since I’ll know what’s what. :man_shrugging:

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https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

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  • user - Permit any user to mount the filesystem. This automatically implies noexec, nosuid,nodev unless overridden.
  • nouser - Only permit root to mount the filesystem. This is also a default setting.
  • defaults - Use default settings. Equivalent to rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async.

Your choice how you want it to be mounted and by whom.

:crossed_fingers:t5:

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I’d like to restrict reptiloids :dragon_face: to mount my drives… :thinking:

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