Format and auto mount drive in fstab

Introduction

Every couple of years, I find myself adding a new drive and inevitably have to search for the installation process each time. To streamline this, I’m compiling all the necessary information here.

Create a partition

Identify your disk with lsblk and unmount it. Now we can delete any previous partition and create a new partition with fdisk, e.g., sudo fdisk /dev/nvme0n1. d to delete a partition, n to create a new one, and w to write.

Create a file system

Once you have created the partition you need to “format it”, by creating a file system, sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p1.

If you forget to create a file system and try to mount the drive you’ll get the following error: mount: /media/m2_4tb: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/nvme0n1p1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

Add drive to fstab

Now we can permanently mount a drive by sudo nvim /etc/fstab and adding the following line,

# mount 4TB m2 to /media/m2_4tb
UUID=edb3ba8f-11fe-4260-8846-0d991e31ac79 /media/m2_4tb     ext4    defaults    0       2