Unallocated Partition

Question

Running GParted I get:

Does "unallocated" mean it's available, I can use it? How do I then "allocate" it?

Answer 1

For shear ease, you could simply format the partition, and mount it as a sub-directory of your home directory:

1. Format the partition to ext4 (for linux) - it will probably be /dev/sdb7
2. Create a directory in your home directory, to use as a mount point
   1. cd /home/<myusername>
   2. mkdir <nameThatMakesSense>
3. Mount the partition to the mount point that you have created
   1. sudo mount /dev/sdb7 /home/<myusername>/<nameThatMakesSense>

Now the partition is a sub-directory of your home directory, and you can use it at will. You may need to create appropriate permissions to access the directory the first time.

Additionally, I would place this in /etc/fstab so that the partition is mounted at boot time. To do that:

• sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
• sudo nano /etc/fstab

scroll to the end of the file, and add a line that looks like

/dev/sdb7 /home/<myusername>/<nameThatMakesSense> ext4 defaults 0 2

If you have used Nano to do the editing, press ctrl+o to save and ctrl+x to exit.

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For some light reading and further information - please review man mount for syntax and examples of how to mount disks, and man fstab for further information about fstab entries.

Knowing little about your system, I chose to make the mount point for the partition a sub-directory of your home assuming that you want to use it to store data you have generated. You could easily place this mount point elsewhere in the directory tree.

Possible dangers: /etc/fstab is read at boot time and mounts the operating partitions of your disk. If you mess up fstab badly enough, you will have trouble getting into your system. In the worst case, you could boot from a live USB, and copy the backup fstab file created above, over the one that got messed up.