What is the best method to add a new hard drive in RHEL 5.4?

Question

What is the best method to add a new hard drive in RHEL 5.4 linux machine? Please go through the following details of linux machine and help me to add one 250 gb hard disk to increase available disk space.

[root@localhost ~]# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda3 220G 3.7G 205G 2% /

/dev/hda1 99M 12M 83M 13% /boot

tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm

Answer 1

Once you physically install the disk, you'll need to do the following:

• use 'fdisk /dev/hdb' to create a partition on the new disk (in this case the new partition would likely be /dev/hdb1). You'll need to set the partition as as primary partition.

• Write a file system -- for ext3 you'd use 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1'

• I also like to assign a disk label to make mounting simpler: e2label /dev/hdb1 /label (where /label is whatever you want, such as /backup).

• update /etc/fstab so that the disk is mounted on boot. LABEL=/label /label ext3 defaults 0 0 For more details on /etc/fstab, you can refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

• run the command 'mount -a' to mount all file systems.

Assuming you've done everything correctly, after running 'mount -a' you should be able to run 'mount' to verify the mounts. If you see that /dev/hdb1 is mounted, then you're good to go.

Answer 2

The key question is what folders inside / are using lots of space and which are continuing to growing. I use the command du to help watch that i.e. du / --max-depth=1 -hx

That will show you how much each top level directory is using. Once you know that, you can pick one of the folders to be the mountpoint for your new harddrive.

Depending on how your server is setup, the most frequent directories to use would be /home and /var.