Manually formatting, mounting and using Hetzner volumes

I’ve recently moved all my server infrastructure over to Hetzner, and to date everything’s been going swimmingly.

The default partition options though aren’t ideal, so I’m scrapping my existing volume and recreating it manually, properly.

Firstly, login to your Hetzner account and create your volume:

Volumes > Create Volume > Size in GB
Name whatever
Mount options Manual
Create & Buy Now

Now find the partition after logging into your server via issuing lsblk. In my case, this was /dev/sdb

You can now partition this new drive as a GPT volume by doing the following:

gdisk /dev/sdb
o
n
enter
enter
enter
w
enter

One partitioned, you can format this new partition as ext4, via the following:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

Seeing as though I’m going to be using this partition as extra storage for downloaded files I don’t really need the reserved blocks it offers, which can be disabled via:

sudo tune2fs -m0 /dev/sdb1

Now, we’ll make a mount point for the newly formatted volume:

mkdir $HOME/mountpoint

It’s also worthwhile grabbing the disk’s UUID via sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 -s UUID -o value.

Now we’re going to add an entry in /etc/fstab so the partition will be mounted automatically. You’ll need to edit this file as root and add the following line:

UUID=your-uuid-from-above /home/youruser/mountpoint ext4 discard,nofail,defaults 0 0

Now that your fstab file is ammended, you can remount all your partitions via: sudo mount -a

Last but not least, change the owner of the directory to prevent file permission issues:

sudo chown youruser:youruser /home/user/mountpoint -R