GUIDE: Adding new hard drive

  • Thanks for trying to help.


    I have spent three days trying to add a new hard drive to my OMV. It's installed on top of Jessie.


    The problem: the drive is not "referenced" and won't show up to allow me to add it as a "shared folder"


    Once I got lucky but gave it a wrong name and so tried using the system to format it "wipe" the hard drive. That did not work, nor has it ever worked. That feature maybe needs to be removed. I have deleted it's name and UUID from everywhere; fstab, OMV's configuration file, etc. But now can't get it to work again.


    I can see the drive under "Physical Disks" And also under "Filesystems" but here it is not "referenced". And it does not show up under "Shared folder." It mounts on Jessie and I can write to it. I have added it manually, using the format of the other drives that were present at install, such as label, etc, in fstab but it still won't show up to be added as "shared folder" even after rebooting the machine.


    There are two sections on my fstab; one for Jessie and the other for OMV. It listed in the Jessie. I pray for the day when Debian would not demand that additional hard drive require all sorts of special treatment; doing chmod 777 to be able to write, putting it in fstab manually if you want auto mount, etc. This is all unnecessary, and I do not see how it's a security feature as quite clearly the user owns the disk. Such efforts should be directed towards protecting the OS, not some external or added hard drive. I suspect that's part of the problem here, but can't be sure.


    With this frustration, I updated to the latest Erasmus, but still no luck.


    I appreciate greatly this software, but since it's a NAS software, one of the things that should be very easy to do is add new storage because people would need to do this all the time. It's often not the case that when building a NAS one has all the capacity needed. And even if that's the case, capacity needs change over time.


    I welcome any help in fixing this problem. Thanks a lot in advance.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I can see the drive under "Physical Disks" And also under "Filesystems" but here it is not "referenced".

    That means there is no shared folder which is located on the new drive.
    You need to create a new shared folder and select as "Device" the new drive.

  • That means there is no shared folder which is located on the new drive.You need to create a new shared folder and select as "Device" the new drive.

    Thanks for your response. But I did indicate on the original post that I cannot create a "shared folder." If I could, I would not have posted the question; creating a shared folder is the main reason for posting. If you are able to re-read the OP you would see that. That the drive is not "referenced" is only part of the problem, but that's not the main problem I'm trying to solve.

  • The disk has to be mounted on the omv web interface to be used for shared folder, existing fstab entries don't work. So delete the fstab entry, unmount the disk. Go to the fs section select the drive and proceed with mount button.

    Thanks a lot. I'd since fixed it while waiting for help. And this is exactly what I did, except I commented out the entries in fstab, rebooted, etc. I wish there's a user's guide out there that lists these steps because, as I said, this need is quite common. And one must not spend two days working on such. So, anyone looking to add new HD to their OMV, must follow these steps, in this EXACT order. If you don't follow these steps in this order, all sorts of problems may occur.


    Assumption: That you have installed OMV on top of Debian (in this case Jessie)
    1. Format your hard drive using gparted. (file system, etc, that's all your choice. Using OMV "wipe" tool has never ever worked for me. So use, gparted
    2. Find a way to create a directory on the hard drive where you'd put files to serve, perhaps using another machine. And here's part of the problem, because if you do so using Debian, you may end up with an fstab entry. YOU DON'T WANT THAT YET. OMV takes priority in making entries in the fstab file
    3. Go to OMV's WEBUI, "Physical Disks" and there you will see your new hard drive.
    4. Go to "Filesystems" and highlight/select the new hard drive and then and click "mount"
    5. Go to "Shared Folders" and then "Add", and assuming you had created a directory on the hard drive, add that directory that you will share, and as well, if you use NFS, would share.


    Part two: Because you want to access the hard drive on the desktop, outside OMV,
    1. Using your terminal, as root, create mount points on your system
    mkdir /media/XXX/XXX/XXX
    6. Use blkid or fdisk -l to get all the information you need on the drive, and then add them to the fstab.
    I have my entries separated.
    OMV's creates it's own which you don't need to touch (except if things go wrong, as in you have not followed these steps and then you'd have to go hunt the drive down in several places, including fstab, to delete any and all references to it. And then start all over again, and again, until you get the process order correct. That order are these steps, you're hopefully following.
    And you create something like:
    #System's HD (and under here list your hard drive information you got earlier, so they can auto mount, depending on your choices in the entry)
    /dev/sxx /media/XXX/XXX extX (and your mount options)


    And that's it. If anyone sees an error in these steps, please correct.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    These steps have apparently worked for you. But usually it is much easier. All the steps
    - wipe disk (if needed)
    - create file system
    - mount
    - create shared folder (including creating the directory on the disk)
    can be easily done from the OMV GUI. No need to manually create folders/directories or edit fstab.


    So I would not call it a guide to add new hard drive disks.

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