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Add a hard drive in FreeBSD



Last modified: Nov. 7, 2013

Contents
1 - Summary
2 - Device information
3 - Create partition
4 - Format partition
5 - Mount partition
6 - Modify fstab


1 - Summary

This guide will show how to add a new hard drive in FreeBSD. It explains how
to partition, format and mount a UFS2 partition. This has been tested in
FreeBSD 9.0.


2 - Device information

Find the device information. In our example, it's da0.
# sysctl kern.disks
kern.disks: da0 cd0 ada1 ada0
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus7 target 0 lun 0
da0: <ST2000VX 000-1CU164 CV22> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device 
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 243201C)


3 - Create partition

Create a partition. We will create a UFS partition.
# gpart show -l da0
gpart: No such geom: da0.
# sudo gpart create -s gpt da0
Password:
da0 created
# sudo gpart add -t freebsd-ufs da0
Password:
da0p1 added
# gpart show -l da0
=>        34  3907029101  da0  GPT  (1.8T)
          34  3907029101    1  (null)  (1.8T)


4 - Format partition

Format the partition.
# ls -1 /dev/da0*
/dev/da0
/dev/da0p1
# sudo newfs -U -O 2 /dev/da0p1
Password:


5 - Mount partition

Create a mount point and mount the partition.
# sudo mkdir /backups
Password:
# sudo mount /dev/da0p1 /backups
Password:
# df -h /backups/
Filesystem    Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0p1    1.8T    1.6G    1.7T     0%    /backups


6 - Modify fstab

Finally, modify /etc/fstab for the new partition. If it's a USB drive, you can
modify /etc/rc.local to mount it on startup.


Last modified: Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 UTC
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