Partitioning and mounting a new disk using LVM

As I've been doing my PhD, I've been acquiring quite a lot of data that needs storing. To this end, I have acquired a new 2 TiB hard drive in my Lab PC. Naturally, this necessitates formatting it so that I can use it. Since I've been using LVM (Logical Volume Management) for my OS disk - so I decided to use it for my new disk too.

Unfortunately, I don't currently have GUI access to my Lab PC - instead for the past few months I've been limited to SSH access (which is still much better than nothing at all), so I can't really use any GUI tool to do this for me.

This provided me with a perfect opportunity to get into LVM through the terminal instead. As it turns out, it's not actually that bad. In this post, I'm going to take you through the process of formatting a fresh disk: from creating a partition table to mounting the LVM logical volume.

Let's start by partitioning the disk. For this, we'll use the fdisk CLI tool (install it on Debian-based systems with sudo apt install fdisk if it's not available already). It should be obvious, but for this tutorial root access is required to execute pretty much all the commands we'll be using.

Start fdisk like so:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdX

Replace X with the index of your disk (try lsblk - no sudo required - to disk your disks). fdisk works a bit like a shell. You enter letters (or short sequences) followed by hitting enter to give it commands. Enter the following sequence of commands:

• g: Create new GPT partition table
• n: Create new partition (allow it to fill the disk)
• t: Change partition type
  • L: List all known partition types
  • 31: Change to a Linux LVM partition
• p: Preview final partition setup
• w: Write changes to disk and exit

Some commands need additional information - fdisk will prompt you here.

With our disk partitioned, we now need to get LVM organised. LVM has 3 different key concepts:

• Physical Volumes: The physical disk partitions it should use as a storage area (e.g. we created an appropriate partition type above)
• Volume Groups: Groups of 1 or more Physical Volumes
• Logical Volumes: The volumes that you use, format, and mount - they are stored in Volume Groups.

To go with these, there are also 3 different classes of commands that LVM exposes: pv* commands for Physical Volumes, vg* for Volume Groups, and lv* for Logical Volumes.

With respect to Physical Volumes, these are physical partitions on disk. For legacy MSDOS partition tables, these must have a partition type of 8e. For newer GPT partition tables (such as the one we created above), these need the partition id 31 (Linux LVM) - as described above.

Next, we create a new volume group that holds our physical volume:

sudo vgcreate vg-pool-name /dev/sdXY

....replacing /dev/sdXY with the partition you want to add (again, lsblk is helpful here). Don't forget to change the name of the Volume Group to something more descriptive than vg-pool-name - though keeping the vg prefix is recommended.

If you like, you can display the current Volume Groups with the following command:

sudo vgdisplay

Then, create a new logical volume that uses all of the space in the new volume group:

sudo lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n lv-rocket-blueprints vg-pool-name

Again, replace vg-pool-name with the name of your Volume Group, and lv-rocket-blueprints with the desired name of your new logical volume. tldr (for which I review pull requests) has a nice page on lvcreate. If you have a tldr client installed, simply do this to see it:

tldr lvcreate

With our logical volume created, we can now format it. I'm going to format it as ext4, but you can format it as anything you like.

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg-pool-name/lv-rocket-blueprints

As before, replace vg-pool-name and lv-rocket-blueprints with your Volume Group and Logical Volume names respectively.

Finally, mount the newly formatted partition:

sudo mkdir /mnt/rocket-blueprints
sudo mount /dev/vg-extra-data/lv-rocket-blueprints /mnt/rocket-blueprints

You can mount it anywhere - though I'd recommend mounting it to somewhere in /mnt.

Auto-mounting LVM logical volumes

A common thing many (myself included) want to do is automatically mount an LVM partition on boot. This is fairly trivial to do with /etc/fstab.

To start, find the logical volume's id with the following command:

sudo blkid

It should be present as UUID="THE_UUID_HERE". Pick out only the UUID of the logical volume you want to automount here. As a side note, using the UUID is generally a better idea than the name, because the name of the partition (whether it's an LVM partition or a physical /dev/sdXY partition) might change, while the UUID always stays the same.

Before continuing, ensure that the partition is unmounted:

sudo umount /mnt/rocket-blueprints

Now, edit /etc/fstab (e.g. with sudo nano /etc/fstab), and append something like this following to the bottom of the file:

UUID=THE_UUID_YOU_FOUND_HERE    /mnt/rocket-blueprints  ext4    defaults,noauto 0   2

Replace THE_UUID_YOU_FOUND_HERE with the UUID you located with blkid, and /mnt/rocket-blueprints with the path to where you want to mount it to. If an empty directory doesn't already exist at the target mount point, don't forget to create it (e.g. with sudo mkdir /mnt/rocket-blueprints).

Save and close /etc/fstab, and then try mounting the partition using the /etc/fstab definition:

sudo mount /mnt/rocket-blueprints

If it works, edit /etc/fstab again and replace noauto with auto to automatically mount it on boot.

That's everything you need to know to get up and running with LVM. I've included my sources below - in particular check out the howtogeek.com tutorial, as it's not only very detailed, but it also has a cheat sheet containing most of the different LVM commands that are available.

Found this useful? Still having issues? Got a suggestion? Comment below!

Sources and further reading

• How to Manage and Use LVM (Logical Volume Management) in Ubuntu
• Answer to "How to mount new logical volume (adding to fstab)?"
• Lvm - Ubuntu Wiki