Linux Filesystems 101 - Block Devices

Formatting a partition

In the last lesson we created a new 614 MiB partition on sda. Let's double-check that it's still there. Type the lsblk command.

See that sda2 partition? Notice that it's not mounted anywhere. The MOUNTPOINT column is empty. Let's try mounting it. By default, Linux has a /mnt directory specifically for use in mounting filesystems temporarily. Type the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Hmm... Didn't work, did it?

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

That's because the sda2 partition hasn't been formatted yet. There's no filesystem on it. It's just a bunch of random data. Let's format it with the EXT4 filesystem. In Linux, the command to format a device is mkfs (make filesystem). Type this command:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

NOTE: The EXT4 filesystem is currently the most commonly used filesystem across all Linux distributions. We will talk more about EXT4 in another course. (Link TBD)

This command should output information about the filesystem created. It will tell you about blocks and inodes, UUID, superblock, etc. For now you can ignore this info. At this point, your sda2 partition is formatted with EXT4. Let's try that mount command again. If you get no error then it was probably successful. Check the result with the lsblk command. Do you see a mountpoint for sda2 now? Let's check the disk space:

df -h /mnt

There should be 545 MiB of free space. Wow. We lost a lot of that 614 MiB to the formatting, didn't we? The filesystem elements (superblock, inode and block bitmaps and tables, journal, etc.) take up a nontrivial amount of space. Keep this in mind when planning out your filesystem needs.

Can you write to the filesystem? Try it. First, you will need to give the techio user write permissions on the directory. Execute this:

sudo chmod ugo+w /mnt

(Change file mode for user, group, and others... add write permissions to /mnt)

Now, do the following commands:

echo Hello, World! > /mnt/hello.txt
ls -lh /mnt
cat /mnt/hello.txt

Did you see the hello.txt file on your new filesystem? Let's try creating a large file, like we did before.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/bigfile bs=1M count=100
ls -lh /mnt
df -h /mnt

After writing the 100 MiB file, df should now report only 445 MiB of free space. Remember I mentioned that /mnt is only intended for temporary mounts? Let's clean up after ourselves and unmount that directory:

sudo umount /mnt
ls -lh /mnt
df -h /mnt
lsblk

After executing the umount command, the other three commands should give you varying bits of evidence indicating that sda2 is no longer mounted on /mnt.