I bought 2 1TB hard drives to use as backup storage. These couldn’t be mounted immediately because they had not been formatted. So what to do next to prepare them for use?

NB the convention for labelling devices has apparently changed and may differ between kernel versions – so what is true for me now (Intrepid kernel 2.6.27-7) may not apply to you. So double check everything you do. You really do not want to wipe the wrong disk 😉 . I repeat, you really, really, really do not want to wipe the wrong disk. I am not an expert so double check everything.

If using an external hard drive it will be called something like /dev/sdb
Your main HDD will be something like /dev/sda

In older times IDE devices would have been HD … but now it is apparently consolidated on SD …

One test that may be useful is
sudo fdisk -l
My output was:

————————————————————————-

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0005bd91

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn’t contain a valid partition table

————————————————————————-

dmesg
is also useful for final confirmation

OK now to do the deed (remember earlier warnings about checking):

sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb

Then
n
to create New partition
Then
p
to create new primary partition
Enter
to accept the size
Bootable is OK – no harm leaving it selected or selecting it.
Type should be Linux (83)
W
for Write
then
yes (not y) to proceed (NB warnings about checking earlier).
It should say it wrote partition table to disk.
Q
for Quit.

If we rerun
sudo fdisk -l
we might get something like:

————————————————————————-

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0005bd91

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 121601 976760001 83 Linux

————————————————————————-

Note that sdb no longer lacks a valid partition table.

Then we need to format the disk (in my case I chose ext3 but ext4 works too):

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

The system will then write the inode tables. The disk should then be unplugged and replugged to get it to mount.

The new HDD was owned by root so I needed to add some folders and give my user permission to add/edit data etc.
sudo chown username -R /media/disk/
Then open drive and add folders etc