Often times, we may have to add additional disks to store application or other data. To make the newly added volume usuable, a filesystem and a partition (if needed) needs to be created from the OS level. In this blog, we will explore the steps to create a partition and a filesystem once a new volume is attached to an EC2 Linux instance.

Execute the following command to check if a filesystem exists on a volume:

sudo file -s /dev/xvdf

Note: the device label could be different in your case if a different label name was selected while attaching the volume.

If the output of the above command is /dev/xvdf: data, then there is no file system on the device.

Refer to the following link for the steps to create a filesystem on a raw volume (without partition):

The steps described below creates a partition on the newly added volume and configures an ext4 file system.

  1. Check the filesystem on the root volume using lsblk -f or df -hT command.
  2. Switch to the root user - sudo su -
  3. Execute the following commands to set the label as gpt and create a filesystem.
 parted /dev/xvdf
 print
 mklabel gpt
 mkpart primary ext4 1MB 18GB
 mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf1
 mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt
  1. Check the UUID of the new disk with the lsblk -f command.
  2. Update the fstab file located in /etc directory.
    vi /etc/fstab
UUID= /mountpoint			  ext4	  defaults,nofail 0 0
mount -a
partprobe
    Note - Append the UUID of the new disk retrieved from step 6 after the = sign and update the mountpoint based on the mountpoint set on step 5.

Once the above commands are executed, a persistent parition on a new volume with a filesystem is created.