Format and Mount an External hard disk in a Linux guest

When mounting an external hard disk in linux, I had to face some troubles and with help some google searches, I could resolve those issues . Here are the steps to mounting an external hard disk in Linux.

1. Open a terminal and log in as the root user

• Create a new directory in a preferred location (mkdir Ext_30GB)
• chmod 777 Ext_30GB
• Try this mount command. Command will fail if partition is not formatted

mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 Ext_30GB/

(If successfully external hard is mounted, ignore following things. If not, go ahead…)

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2. Enter following commands in terminal
   • fdisk –l

Preview

Disk /dev/sdb: 32.2 GB, 32212254720 bytes
 64 heads, 51 sectors/track, 19275 cylinders, total 62914560 sectors
 Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

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Solve ‘Disk /dev/sdb doesn’t contain a valid partition table’ pproblem

• fdisk /dev/sdb

Enter following commands in the prompt,

• Create a new partition table with ‘o‘
• Create a new partition with ‘n‘
• Create a ‘Linux’ partition ‘l‘
• Let it use the default values by hitting ENTER when it asks for numbers, to take the entire available disk in this partition
• Write the new partition table with ‘w‘, which should dump you back to the prompt.

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Try the mount command again,

mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 Ext_30GB/

(It will success or following error message will appear)

Preview

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

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Then you should have a /dev/sdb1 to format with mkfs.

• file -s /dev/sdb1

• mke2fs -S /dev/sdb1

• mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1

• file -s /dev/sdb1

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Try the mount command again,

mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 Ext_30GB/

It should be working now