Adding new 5TB data only drive[SOLVED]

Tony0945 · Last edited by Tony0945 on Fri Dec 11, 2015 10:49 pm; edited 1 time in total

I bought a CyberMonday special 5TB SATA drive WD5001FZWX that I intend to use for storing videos and backups of iso's. My one dual-boot machine is with XP, so I'm going to put this drive into one of the Gentoo only machines. The machine I've picked already has an ext4 boot drive and a JFS data drive. I'm thinking of partitioning the new drive as ext4, since I'm not happy with having to run fsck on every boot with the JFS drive. This machine already has a working minidlna server. I'm assuming that I can access this drive from XP via Samba. If not, oh well. Samba is already set up and working, serving the JFS drive. It's running Mate and has gparted installed.

All the wiki articles seem to assume that you want to boot the GPT drive. Would it be advantageous to install a boot partition now, even though I don't intend to use it?
Will the new drive apper as /dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1 ? Would I add a line to /etc/fstab as if it were an MBR drive or must I use the GUID?

The current kernel is

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 10:27 am Post subject:

Tony0945,

You will want to use GPT on that 5Tb drive or you will only get to see the first 2TiB, which is a bit of a waste.
Check your kernel for GPT support.

If /dev/sdc is your next free SCSI device, you will have three SCSI devices. Its possible that some or all of your existing devices will be reordered, so the new drive need not be /dev/sdc

You can update fstab as you see fit. Using UUIDs means the device nodes allocated by the kernel are not used, so device ordering does not matter.
It can still be important to your boot loader as your root= may change.

You can share the filesystems on the drive via samba, not the drive. That's a pedantic but important difference.

You can make a /boot if you want to, against the day you want to boot from the drive, you might also want a grub_boot too in case you want to boot from the drive in a UEFI system. Personally, I wouldn't do either, I would boot from a USB stick if I ever needed that. More likely, with the falling price of SSDs, use a SSD as a system drive.

You won't need any software updates apart from ensuring you hove GPT support in your kernel.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

steveL · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 1:57 pm Post subject:

Tony0945 · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 2:58 pm Post subject:

Thanks, Neddy. I didn't think about the kernel. Is this sufficient?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:29 pm Post subject:

Tony0945,

If you want to use root=PARTUUID= in your boot loader that's fine.
Its a bit fragile with logical partitions on MSDOS but otherwise OK.

Its not needed in fstab because mount is being used, so mount not being available is not an issue.
I don't know if PARTUUID is supported in fstab.

CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y is the one you need or the kernel won't be able to read the GPT partition table.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Tony0945 · Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 10:43 pm Post subject:

Got the drive a couple of days ago. I let it sit in the house to temperature stabilize for two days because it was really C-O-L-D when it was delivered.

Installing was a little difficult. It shouldn't have been. The third drive slot in the cage was empty, but I had to remove an unused PVR-150 TV card to slip it in. There was only one SATA socket left on the mobo (not four), but that was all I needed. There were no more new style five pin power connecters available but I found my last adapter in the basement. I have to order more. I rebooted the computer (shut down of course for the installation) and logged into Mate. Gparted wouldn't run from the menu so I tried the command line. I had to "su" first. The new drive was /dev/sdc as I had hoped so I didn't have to shut down and play with the connectors.

Gparted offered me gpt as the first choice rather than MBR. Of course, I accepted it. I created a 520MB first partition, as I had read on line that there are sometimes problems with smaller values. The problems seem to be with Windows and this is a windowless machine, but I figured I could afford to waste 520MiB out of 5,000GiB. I created a FAT32 partition and searched a bit to find how to mark it as ESP. Turns out the on the menu under Partition->flags, the flag choice of esp was there and clicking it turned on "boot" by default. Then I put the entire rest of the drive as a single ext4 partition. I edited /etc/samba/smb.conf. I had an existing section for /dev/sdb1 which is mounted as /video. I copied it verbatim changing /video to /video2. Likewise with the /etc/fstab line (changing device to /dev/sdc2 and mount point from /video to /video2) . Then it was just