Creating and Managing Filesystems

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Partitioning

Each main storage device can be broken into a total of 4 primary partitions. If you had a device named sda you could partition it 4 times by means of primary partitioning. If you needed more then 4 partitions you could sacrifice 1 of your 4 primary partitions as an extended partition and create more partitions there called logical partitions.


The fdisk command can be used to create partitions on a storage device. By running fdisk you can utilize an interact prompt to create a new partition on the drive. Once the new partition is created you will use the mkfs command to create a filesystem on this partition, and then the mount command to mount the device.


Example:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

  • n (new partiton)
  • p (primary partition)
  • 1 (partition number)
  • set first sector (default)
  • set last sector (default, or use +/-size{K,M,G,T,P})
  • w (to write changes)
  • w (to quit)


Filesystem

Once you have created your partitions you can now create a filesystem on that partition. Use the mkfs system to create a filesystem. Some of the types of filesystems you can write include ext2, ext3, ext4, fat, etc.


Example:

sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda1

Mounting and Unmounting

Now that you have successfully created a partition and have written a filesystem to it you can now mount the filesystem with the mount command.


Example:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/newA1