Designdesk

Partition and format hard disk drive to ext4

How to format a brand new hdd from the command line interface (CLI), easy steps. Instructions to make a properly aligned partition that uses the whole device. Perform theses operations as root.

First, find out block name (/dev/sdX) with lsblk

Make sure you pick the right device, or you could end up wiping all your data !

Parted

We need to populate the partition table before we can proceed further. Run parted for the device you want to format parted /dev/sdX

Once you are in parted :

GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sdX
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel gpt
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdX will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes
(parted) mkpart
Partition name?  []? storage
File system type?  [ext2]? ext4
Start? 0%
End? 100%
(parted) quit

Mkfs, tune2fs, e2label

Now we need to format the volume to be able to use it mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1

You probably want to be able to use 100% of your storage space, so let's remove root allocated space witch uses 5% of the disk by default

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdX1

Then we give a name to the partition (optional) e2label /dev/sdX1 storage

Fstab, mount

If you want your new volume to be mounted automatically when you restart your machine.

First find your device block id with blkid

Then open fstab with text editor nano /etc/fstab

Add this line at the end of the file (change UUID value to match your disk, change /storage if you want to use another mount point)

UUID=0c0514c1-4fe3-41b4-ac7b-61a019481356 /storage auto noatime 0 0

You may need to mkdir /storage (or other mount point) before you can mount with mount -a