Add a new disk to ubuntu in Virtualbox

I have a Ubuntu box running in virutualbox as a local development environment. It’s very handy for exploring some new tools or working on some side projects. It has been working well for quite a long time until I recently noticed that the disk space is almost used up. So I decided to add one extra disk to it. That sounds really easy with VirtualBox, righ?

This is what I did:

• Shutdown the vm
• Create a new disk in VirtualBox Manager and assign it to the Ubuntu vm.
• Start the VM, but surprisingly that the newly added disk didn’t show up when I run df -lh

After some google search, I realized that I need to format the disk and mount it to Ubuntu file systems, so here is what needed:

• run sudo fdisk -l, to list all available disks, and the newly added disk should be in it. In my case, it’s /dev/sdb
• run sudo fdisk /dev/sdb, and follow the prompts to format the disk
• run sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 to format the disk to ext4
• run sudo mkdir /disk2 as the mount point
• edit /etc/fstab and add a line like: dev/sdb1 /disk2 ext4 defaults 1 2
• restart and the disk should be available to use.

References

• Vmware Linux Guest Add a New Hard Disk Without Rebooting Guest
• Creating a new virtual disk for an existing Linux virtual machine