Formating to use the USB thumb drive

Formating to use the USB thumb drive

Introduction:

This article show how to enable and use the USB drive in the ZPE Nodegrid. The Nodegrid recognizes EXT4 file system.  Other file system may not be recognizable in the Nodegrid.
Having the USB thumb drive in the Nodegrid allows extended storage for logging files and storing any needed files, allows VMs and Docker container runs on the USB.

Steps:

When a new USB is connected to the Nodegrid,  the Nodegrid OS may not recognized the file system and will not mount the thumb drive. use "lsblk" to check the thumb drive

  1. root@Nodegrid:~# lsblk
  2. NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
  3. loop0    7:0    0    2G  0 loop /media/loopfs
  4. sda      8:0    0 29.8G  0 disk
  5. |-sda1   8:1    0    2M  0 part
  6. |-sda2   8:2    0   94M  0 part
  7. |-sda3   8:3    0 96.3M  0 part /media/hdCnf
  8. |-sda4   8:4    0  4.7G  0 part /
  9. |-sda5   8:5    0   95M  0 part /media/hdUser
  10. |-sda6   8:6    0   61M  0 part
  11. |-sda7   8:7    0  477M  0 part /boot
  12. `-sda8   8:8    0 24.4G  0 part /media/hdVar
  13. sdb      8:16   1 57.8G  0 disk
  14. `-sdb1   8:17   1 57.8G  0 part

Format the USB drive to EXT4 to be use in the Nodegrid.
root@Nodegrid:~# mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1

Once the format have been completed,  the USB needs to be reseated for the Nodegrid OS to mount the the USB thumb drive

  1. root@Nodegrid:~# df -h                  
  2. Filesystem                                                                                             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  3. /dev/sda4                                                                                              4.7G  1.7G  2.9G  36% /
  4. devtmpfs                                                                                               1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
  5. /dev/sda3                                                                                               88M   27M   55M  33% /media/hdCnf
  6. /dev/sda8                                                                                               24G  2.2G   21G  10% /media/hdVar
  7. /dev/sda5                                                                                               87M   15K   80M   1% /media/hdUser
  8. /dev/loop0                                                                                             2.0G  5.5M  1.9G   1% /media/loopfs
  9. cgroup                                                                                                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
  10. /dev/sda7                                                                                              477M   77M  401M  17% /boot
  11. default:ext-sto-zdk1njg4zdutntaymy00ytixlwjjndqtzmq2zgrkyjvmztji/f4726fdb-49b5-47e2-b551-f19d98ff802a  1.0P     0  1.0P   0% /var/local/file_manager/remote_file_system/extended_storage/son-bsr_220691018
  12. default:ext-sto-zdk1njg4zdutntaymy00ytixlwjjndqtzmq2zgrkyjvmztji/97a40e37-1489-444c-80da-4ea99c91d6eb  1.0P     0  1.0P   0% /var/local/file_manager/remote_file_system/extended_storage/Shared
  13. /dev/sdb1                                                                                               57G   24K   54G   1% /run/media/sdb1
the drive is now recognized as /run/media/sdb1 in the Nodegrid OS root shell and also can be found in the Nodegrid Manager System::Toolkit "File Manager" folder "/home/admin_group/sdb1"