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HDD Formatting on Linux Ubuntu 18.04

Good day!

I have been messing with Linux in the past few days. Currently, I have Ubuntu 18.04 on my SSD Disk and I have a free 1TB Hard Disk that I want to use, to download most of my files on.
There was a WIndows OS on it that I have recently deleted. I am wondering how can I get that HDD working as a storage.
There's a number of tools you can use. gdisk, fdisk, and parted are all terminal based options. You could also use gparted for a GUI based tool. I believe the gnome desktop environment has it's own tool called gnome disk or something. Once you partition it you will just need to put a file system on it, ext4 is the fairly standard option. If it is an external drive which you would like to potentially use it on Windows computers you can use ntfs with it, but you will have to install some extra tools to get it working.

If it is just a secondary internal drive, after partitioning and making the filesystem you will need to update /etc/fstab to have it be mounted on boot.
Just in terminal to find which disk and note /dev/***
  • sudo fdisk -l



Then just use this command.
  • sudo shred -v -z -n 3 /dev/***



Any OS will be able to create a partition during installation.


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