Adding A Hard Drive in Linux Mint 19.2
In this post, I’ll be adding a hard drive to my pc running Linux Mint 19.2.
The disk is already physically installed to the computer, so the first step is to launch the Disks app, which is located in the Preferences submenu of the Mint menu located in the bottom left of the desktop.
The disk I’m adding already contains some old data and apps I no longer need, so it’ll need to be wiped first. I selected the disk I want to work on in the list on the left side of the app window, in this case the 2 TB drive. The graphic in the center of the window shows the partitions currently on this disk. This hard drive was originally set up for a Windows computer, so I’m going to delete all those partitions and reformat the drive. To delete a partition, select it by clicking it in the graphic, then click the delete button (that’s the button labeled with a minus sign under the graphic.) Disks will prompt you to confirm the deletion. Do so. Repeat this for each partition on the drive.
With all the old partitions deleted, it’s time create new ones. Click the + button underneath the graphic, which will bring up the Create Partition dialog. I’m going to keep this setup simple and just create a single partition, which means sticking with the default settings. Click Next.
This brings up the Format Volume dialog. In the Volume Name field, you can enter a meaningful name for the, well, volume. If you really want to blast any old data that was on the disk beyond any reasonable hope of recovery, switch the Erase option on. Just be advised that on larger partitions this can take significantly longer. This drive is sitting in a desktop in my apartment. It’s didn’t and isn’t going to contain anything sensitive, so I left this option off. This is an internal disk in a Linux machine, so I chose that for Type. With the options set, click Create.
I’m going to want this drive mounted and ready to use when I start the system, so once it’s finished formatting, click the Options button on the app window. (That’ll be the button with the picture of little gears on it.) Make sure the User Session Defaults slider is pulled all the way to the left (it won’t be by default) and that the Mount at system startup option is checked. Click OK. I could just go ahead and mount the drive now, but I want to make sure it automatically mounts at system startup, so let’s go ahead and reboot.
The computer is rebooted. The new drive is mounted, and just as importantly, writable.
