tstuder's picture

I am running Turnkey FIle Server on VMWare ESXi 5.0, I have added a second Virtual Disk but am having trouble with creating a partition on it so that I can create a volume, then create a folder share. I go into Hardware, Select Partitions on Local Disk, I see the 2 Drives SCSI device A and SCSI device B, SCSI A shows 2 Partitions and SCSI B shows no partitions. I select SCSI B, then Add Primary partition, then select type NTFS, then press the "Create" button. What should happen next? cause nothing happens for me.
 
Is this what I should be doing or am I way out in left field?
 
My goal is to have a Drive that is going to be used to share a Single folder out to the network.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

I would use a native Linux FS rather than a native Windows one. ext4 would be my recommendation. My rationale for that is that Linux support for native FS is much better than foreign ones and if you encounter errors, then data recovery is much more flakey... And for your purposes using NTFS doesn't actually provide any advantage (only disadvantage) unless of course you plan on mounting the vHDD to a Windows machine/VM (as Windows accesses the files via the Fileserver appliance it won't care what FS the Fileserver OS is using...). FWIW I don't think the kernel modules required to create and use NTFS are installed by default in TKL so perhaps that is why it's not working for you...? (So perhaps retry your steps using ext4 instead of NTFS).

Secondly, I am unfamilar with ESXi (and personally don't use VMware products) but in other hypervisors I have used I have found that best practice is to add the additional vHDD while the VM is off. Sometimes recognition of the additional hardware is flakey if not done like that...

Personally I do all my partitioning from the commandline (at least then you generally get useful error messages) and have used the fdisk command successfully on a number of occasions. Google should find you tons of usage examples and plenty of documentation. If you prefer a GUI (and the suggestion in the first paragraph doesn't help) then you could always download the ISO of GParted and boot your VM with that...

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