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If you have two hard drives you can mount secondary hard drive to be used for (cPanel/WHM) backups or for web hosting more sites. The hard drives must not be in any kind of Raid setup. Process of partitioning, formatting and mounting is quite simple.
First check what disk drives do you have. Usually disk drives on Linux are named /dev/sda (primary HDD), /dev/sdb (secondary HDD) or something similar.
You can get a list of disk drives in system using this command
fdisk -l | grep '^Disk' |
The output should be something like this:
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytesDisk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes |
So those are two 500 GB hard drives…
If you execute command like the one below you’ll get more detailed preview of your hard discs and their partitions:
fdisk -l |
Output should looks like this:
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylindersUnits = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytesSector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytesI/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesDisk identifier: 0x1c7e861c Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylindersUnits = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytesSector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytesI/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesDisk identifier: 0x00080071 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System/dev/sda1 * 1 14 104448 83 Linux/dev/sda2 14 144 1048576 82 Linux swap / Solaris/dev/sda3 144 60802 487232512 83 Linux |
You should notice that second hard disk (/dev/sdb) has no partition and that probably means that it’s un-partitioned yet.
So let’s make the partition on /dev/sdb by executing
fdisk /dev/sdb |
and then use following in the prompt
– “n” for new partion
– “p” for primary partition
– “1” for the first partition
– “w” to save what I have done
That has created and saved new partition and it will be called /dev/sdb1 (first partition on /dev/sdb). Next step is to format it.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 |
On newer distributions (CentOS 6.x for eg) use this command to format a new partition.
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 |
If you want to use this hard disk for backup make /backup folder or if you want to use it to store more sites make new home folder called /home2
mkdir /backupmkdir /home2 |
Now just mount the backup partition or the new home partition
mount /dev/sdb1 /backupmount /dev/sdb1 /home2 |
Now you can use the additional hard drive for cPanel/WHM backups or storing new sites. cPanel should automatically detect /home2 and should ask you whether you like to setup new account on /home or at /home2.
If you want the partition to auto mount on server (re)boot edit fstab file located at /etc/fstab and add one of following lines at the bottom of it depending if you for /backup folder or the line below for /home2 folder:
/dev/sdb1 /backup ext3 defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /home2 ext3 defaults 0 0
Note: After adding one of these lines press add one more empty line below since fstab requires the new line symbol at the end of every config line. Before you issue the following command, be aware that this re-mounts ALL Filesystems, and will more than likely disconnect most other users
To make sure this mounts automatically, issue the following command:
mount -a |
If you got no errors – your mount worked, try df -h too check if everything looks correct.
