My system currently runs an XBMC live install. I am installing a second hard drive in my system. Since it is XBMC I believe I need to do everything from the command line.
Can anyone tell me what I need to do with the commands and proper parameters?
As an aside, I am planning on formatting as ext2. The game plan is to share this drive on my network, so I can copy files to it from my Mac running OSX. Should I use a different format?
Ext2 does not do journalling. I.e. if have a power-loss or something like that, there is a probability to lose file meta-data with ext2. Plus, a fsck-run is absolutely needed after a crash which will take large amounts of time on current sized disks.
Thus, just use ext3 of xfs, which do both have journaling. mkfs.xfs runs faster. ext4 is relatively new, and one is usually a little conservative when it comes to filesystems.
If you want to use your complete disk under linux, you do not even need to partition it. You can just use /dev/sdX then when creating or mounting the disk.
If you want to partition it, use cfdisk, since it has a convenient user interface.
Be sure to use the right devices for creating the filesystem. Check via
ls /dev/hd*
ls /dev/sd*
fdisk -l
mount
What devices are available and already in use.
hdparm -i /dev/sdX
shows the vendor/model information and size and more to double check, if you get the right device.
Create filesystem then:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdX
or
mkfs.xfs /dev/sdX
Test to mount it via
mount /dev/sdX /mnt/point
If the mount point does not exist, you have to create it first via mkdir.
You can change the ownership of the base directory after mounting it via
chown user:group /mnt/point
To mount the disk after each boot, usually you configure it via /etc/fstab
/dev/sdX /mnt/point auto auto,defaults 0 0
Since you use a Live-CD, perhaps they have a different style of configuration.
To check if some hardware problems happened during mkfs you can enter
dmesg
and check the most recent output.
On alternative to having to specify a device name in fstab is to specify a label during filesystem creation (e.g. mkfs.ext3 -L name) and use LABEL=name in the fstab (or with mount) instead of the device name.
So I am not sure if this is correct or the best way but this is what I did and it seems to work:
As root: fdisk -l to see all the partitions and find how mine is listed. It will be something like /dev/sda1. As a note the drive I installed has been used before so it had existing partitions. With an un-partitioned drive I have a feeling this will not work.
As root: fdisk /dev/sda to run fdisk. You drop the number off the end to get the physical drive name.
Type: p to list the partitions on the drive again. This is mainly a sanity check to make sure you are working on the correct drive.
If you have partitions on the drive you need to delete then type d and follow the prompts to delete them.
Type: n to create a new partition.
It will prompt you to create an extended or primary partition. I did primary so I did p.
It will then prompt for partition number. I did 1.
It will then prompt for first cylinder number. I just hit enter for the default of 1.
It will then prompt for the last cylinder number. I just did the default based on my disk size and hit enter.
You can the type p again to verify the new partition is entered correctly.
Type t to enter the hex code for the type of partition you want. I did 83 for ext2.
Type w to write the partition table.
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1 to actually format the partition.fsck -f -y /dev/sda to check the drive, and set it up to be mounted upon each reboot.