Linux/Hard Drive Management

Various commands and tools to manage disks in Linux.

General

GUI Hard Drive Management:

• Use the gparted program.

Verifying a download against a hash: Some large files (particularly iso/img files, such as for an OS install) will have an associated SHA256 string on the website download page.
To verify your download had no errors, you can run the command:

• sha256sum <file_location>

This should output a string, which you can directly compare to the string on the website. If they match, then the file is valid with no errors.

File Management

Copying Files

Copy Files Locally:

dd if=<input_location> of=<output_location> status=progress conv=fsync

Copy Files Over a Network:

rsync -avh <input_location> <output_location>

Note that input/output locations can be a local file path or a network path. If it's a network path, then it takes the format of:

• <username>@<network_location>:<input_or_output_location>

Sym Links

ln -s <location_of_original_file_or_folder> <location_of_sym_link>

In this case, the <location_of_sym_link> will point to <location_of_original_file_or_folder>.

View General Drive Info

For a simple overview, use:

• lsblk

For more detail, use:

• sudo fdisk -l

Change Label of Drive

The drive label is generally what an OS will automatically name the drive, upon mounting.
Thus, it can be useful to give your drive labels meaningful names.

For the following commands:

• <partition> corresponds to the partition name (ex, sda1, sdb2, etc).
• <label_name> corresponds to the new label you wish to give the drive.

Ext Partitions

e2label /dev/<partition> <label_name>

NTFS Partitions

ntsflabel /dev/<partition> <label_name>

Mounting a Samba Network Share

Warn: The following method saves password credentials to a file, and is only secure if no one else has sudo/root access on the machine.

First install the required packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install cifs-utils

Create Mount Location

Next, create your local mount directory. This can be anywhere, technically. But for organizational practices, it's standard to mount "permanent" drive locations (such as this) under the /mnt folder of your Linux install. In this example, we'll call it network_share, but you can call it whatever you like.

sudo mkdir /mnt/network_share
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/network_share

Set Drive Credentials

We need a way to access credentials for this drive. To do this, we create a file that holds our credentials, and then limit permissions to the root user to make it secure. This makes it so no other users can see this unless they have sudo access (But at that point, anyone that has sudo access to this system can already see any file they want, if they desire).

We create this file under /etc/sambapasswords, and name the file the same as our mount folder name. But again, technically this file can be called whatever you want, and stored in any location you wish, as long as you're consistent.

sudo mkdir /etc/sambapasswords
sudo nano /etc/sambapasswords/network_share

At this point, we're editing our credential file. Add the credentials via the two following lines, where you enter your network connection credentials instead of leaving it blank (no spaces).

username=
password=

Set permissions on the file so that no unauthorized users can read it.

sudo chmod 400 /etc/sambapasswords/network_share

Create Auto-mount Command

Now we add the command to automatically mount this drive on computer startup. This is done by editing your fstab file with sudo nano /etc/fstab. In this file, add the following lines:

Note: You'll need to replace network_location with the proper location to your network storage drive. Also, if you used different values in the above steps (credential file location, mount folder name, etc), then replace the corresponding value in this line.

//<network_location> /mnt/network_share cifs credentials=/etc/sambapasswords/network_share,user 0 0

Save the changes to your fstab file and exit. At this point, you should be done. You can test that it works by running

sudo mount -a

Warn: If you get an error at this stage, either correct it or comment out the line you added to your fstab before restarting your computer. Errors in your fstab file on restart generally cause ubuntu to not boot into normal mode, which is annoying to deal with.

If you got an error, then it likely displays in the command output and should be corrected before restarting your machine.

If you get no output, then it likely mounted correctly. Congratulations! You can verify by opening your /mnt/network_share folder and checking that it has the files you expect.