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Formatting and partitioning 
storage devices
Once you've installed a physical or virtual disk, you're well on your way to 
benefiting from additional storage. But in order to utilize a disk, it must first be 
formatted. In order to ensure we're 
formatting the correct disk, we need to find the 
name the device was given. As you already know from the previous section, there's 
a 
specific naming scheme that is used in Linux distributions to name disks. So you 
should already know the device name of the new disk. As explained earlier, you 
can use the 
sudo fdisk -l
 command to see details regarding the storage devices 
attached to your server:
sudo fdisk –l
This will produce an output that looks something like the following:
Figure 9.3: Using fdisk -l to view a list of storage devices on the server
In my case, the device 
/dev/sdb
 is brand-new—I just added it to the server. Since I'm 
using a VirtualBox virtual machine for the examples in this chapter, the new disk 
shows a model of 
VBOX HARDDISK
. It doesn't have any partitions currently; notice how 
we see a few lines above it referring to a different hard disk and partitions, such as 
/
dev/sda3
. We don't have any lines like that in the description underneath for 
/dev/
sdb
. If we did have one or more partitions on that device, they would show up in the 
output.

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Chapter 9