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First of all I am a brand-newbie to linux/ubuntu. Second, I have searched on my own for a way to do this for 4 hours and just can't quite find it or find it explained the right way. I apologize if this is a duplicate or a difficulty 1/100 for any basic linux/ubuntu user.

That being said, here is my setup: I am running Xubuntu 12.04 alongside ChromeOS via "crouton" on an Acer c7 Chromebook. It's a fresh install from yesterday (the xubuntu that is). I've managed to figure out the launcher, and the apt-get and ppa repository and that stuff... for the most part. I got a few basic programs - FireFox, Skype, VLC, Audacious, and qBittorrent. So now I'm ready to download some videos and music and I arrived at my problem.

The problem is I am (very) quickly running out of space (660 MB remaining). Thing is it's a 320 GB HDD and I have a 311 GB drive sitting greyed out on my desktop. When I try right-clicking and mounting, I get this:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/MVUgP.png
Click for large size.

So I went in sudo fdisk -l and it promptly told me that /dev/sda was a GPT and fdisk could not format it, and I needed to get GNU Parted. So I tried simply "sudo apt-get install parted" and sure enough it grabbed GNU Parted 2.3. Here is what (parted) print returned for me:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQ1h1.png
Click for large size.

So my question is how can I get this 311 GB of space working for me as storage? To be clear it's just a partition on my internal 320 GB HDD that came with my Acer c7 chromebook. Do I need to mount it somehow or could I somehow change one of the other existing partitions to just be bigger?

Again I apologize for my level of noviceness and any help is much appreciated!

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  • Can you try an mount it in dolphin? Not sure about this, but in Nautilus you can mount by clicking on the device in the file manager. Alternative solution. You should use a tool like parted or gparted to find the name of the partition (fi. sda1) and then you chould add that to fstab. What is the result of the command sudo mount?
    – don.joey
    Aug 16, 2013 at 16:52
  • I'm not sure what Dolphin or Nautilus are. I tried mounting by right-clicking the device and that's when I got the authorization error. I got parted, the name of the partion is /dev/sda/ and it's partition #7 it looks like for the 311 GB. Haven't tried sudo mount yet. As for the images, I'm new so I'm unable to insert images directly into my posts. Also limited to 2 links sorry
    – Rothman182
    Aug 16, 2013 at 16:58
  • No. From what I know sda is your harddrive and your partition would be sda7. You could try and mount it. Not sure, but something like mkdir /media/test then after it sudo mount /dev/sda7 /media/test. Can you tell us whether that worked?
    – don.joey
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:05
  • @Rothman182 could you add your /var/log/auth.log? Is either a pam misconfiguration or gksudo being called incorrectly.
    – Braiam
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:06
  • @Private right, kind of saying the same thing different ways. Ok it seems to have worked, the icon on my desktop is now lit up (not greyed out) and says it is mounted to /media/test/. Thing is in my filesystem it still says "208.6MB available" at the bottom, so is it being used for storage? Do I just need to reboot for that to get updated?
    – Rothman182
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:12

1 Answer 1

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For a partition or internal hard disk to be accessible in ubuntu it has to be 'mounted'. You can mount partitions manually or automatically.

To mount them manually:

  1. Find out the name of the partition you want to mount. I find it easy to use gparted sudo apt-get install gparted). You can run sudo gparted in the commandline. Be careful not to mess anything up. Then you write down the name of the partition you want to mount (for instance sda2).

  2. Now you need to create a mounting point. That is a point in your filesystem at which the partition will be accessible. It is not actually at that point, it just accessible at that point. You can create a directory for this. For instance, mkdir /media/extra_drive. Usually you would make this in the media directory which is also where usb sticks will be mounted. Media is usually used for mounts for a particular user (not systemwide, then you'd use mnt).

  3. Now you can mount the partition using

      sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/extra_drive
    
  4. This can be unmounted manually using sudo umount /media/extra_drive. The mount is not boot-persistent and you will have to do it on each reboot.

Mounting it on every boot is not handy, therefore you should mount it automatically. To mount it automatically on each boot you have to add it to your fstab file. There is a nice wiki for that, so I will not repeat all the info here unless it is unclear. Essentially you find the UUID (ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/) and then do the following:

  1. Duplicate your fstab file:

     sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
    
  2. Compare the two files to confirm the backup matches the original:

     cmp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
    
  3. Open the original fstab in a text editor:

     gksu gedit /etc/fstab 
    

and add these lines into it

    # (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings) 
    UUID=????????   /media/dir_of_your_choice    ext4          defaults       0       2 

Whether you mount it manually or automatically, the partition as such does not add itself to your home folder (which will thus remain low on space). So you will have to put files on that partition manually if you want to be able to work on as you do now. Even better would be to give your /home directory its own partition. For more info on that (which requires a bit of reading and work), cf. this nice wiki page. Depending on the size of your home partition your +-300GB partition would make for a nice home folder. The biggest advantage of your home folder is that you reinstall ubuntu without losing your files (if you know what you are doing and can do the install such that the home partition is untouched).

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  • Ah ok I think that giving the /home directory its own partition is exactly the idea I was looking for. I would love to have the /home directory have that 290 GB of free space for its use rather than having to store files over on the other partition. I will check that wiki! Thanks for the post!
    – Rothman182
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:44
  • You are welcome. It looks more daunting than it is and once you get the hang of it, you will probably use it on all your installs.
    – don.joey
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:45
  • I just see in your title that you have a fresh install. You could also simply reinstall and then there is an option to configure your partitions manually. Use a 1500MB boot partition, a swap partition twice the size of your ram, a 30GB / (root) partition and select your 311GB as your /home partition and Ubuntu will do everything for you.
    – don.joey
    Aug 16, 2013 at 17:48

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