Difference between revisions of "Add an additional hard drive"

Revision as of 16:31, 21 September 2010

WARNING!!! Do not follow this procedure unless you have a basic understanding of how to format hard drives and you know that you are definately working with a hard drive that contains no important data. The process can cause you to lose all of the data on your hard drive.

If (after installing LinuxMCE) you would like to add a brand-new (BLANK) hard drive to your Core/Hybrid to add additional storage space for Media you can use the following procedure:

• Install the physical hard drive into the computer
• Check that the BIOS settings all look correct (Hard drive boot order etc)
• Boot up LinuxMCE and ssh into the core.
• Create a partition on the disk using the fdisk command

ie. sudo fdisk /dev/sdX (for a SATA drive where X is the number of the new drive)

• Create a filesystem on this new partition (XFS is the recommended option)

ie. sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/sdXY (for partition 'Y' on SATA drive 'X')

• Watch the screen of your nearest Orbiter for a few minutes to see if the new partition is automatically detected.
• If it does not get auto detected then reboot the core and it should be auto detected.
• Tell LinuxMCE how you want to use the new drive (ie as an Internal Drive that uses the LinuxMCE structure etc)
• Reload the router.
• Enjoy your new storage space.

Example

lukas@dcerouter:/dev/disk$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x3272b98c.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.


The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 243201.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Command (m for help): m
Command action
   a   toggle a bootable flag
   b   edit bsd disklabel
   c   toggle the dos compatibility flag
   d   delete a partition
   l   list known partition types
   m   print this menu
   n   add a new partition
   o   create a new empty DOS partition table
   p   print the partition table
   q   quit without saving changes
   s   create a new empty Sun disklabel
   t   change a partition's system id
   u   change display/entry units
   v   verify the partition table
   w   write table to disk and exit
   x   extra functionality (experts only)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.3 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3272b98c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

Command (m for help): n
Command action
   e   extended
   p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-243201, default 1): 
Using default value 1
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (1-243201, default 243201): 
Using default value 243201

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

lukas@dcerouter:/dev/disk$ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1 
meta-data=/dev/sdb1              isize=256    agcount=4, agsize=122094500 blks
         =                       sectsz=512   attr=2
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=488378000, imaxpct=5
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096  
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=32768, version=2
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=0
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0


Keywords: new hard drive, HDD, extra hard drive, second hard drive.