Guide to adding a new partition or drive to an existing system

Suppose you are required to create a 10 GB partition on your server running Linux, you have got two options namely :

• Create a partition from the unpartitioned space on your machine or
• Add a new drive.
  

If you are opting for the latter then it is a simple thing of plugging in the new drive, letting the system detect it, using a partitioning tool to create the requisite partition, formating the newly created partition and finally mounting it. But if it is the former namely, creating a partition from unpartitioned space, then the task gets a bit trickier.

Joey Prestia explains the exact steps needed to add a new partition to an existing system. The task can be broken down into the following steps :

1. Determine what partitions need to be created and where.
2. Create the partitions (I use 'fdisk' here but any Linux disk partitioning tool should work)
3. Re-read the partition table either with 'partprobe' or by a reboot
4. Make a filesystem on the partition, label it, and create the necessary mount points
5. Add the appropriate entries to '/etc/fstab' so the partitions are mounted upon reboot
   

Check out Joey's notes to know the exact commands used to accomplish the above tasks.