This topic uses an ECS instance running the Ubuntu operating system to show how to
create a file system on a raw data disk. You can skip the steps to create a new partition,
such as /dev/vdb1 or /dev/vdb2, and directly create a file system if no partition
is required. This method is only applicable to ECS instances running a Linux operating
system.
Procedure
- Remotely connect to an ECS instance as a root user. For more information, see Overview.
- Run the following command to view the name of the attached cloud disk.
fdisk -l
If the following output is displayed, it indicates that the ECS instance has two cloud
disks: /dev/vda as the system disk and /dev/vdb as a data disk.

- Create a file system for the /dev/vdb data disk. Example:
- Create an ext4 file system
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb
- Create an ext3 file system
mkfs.ext3 /dev/vdb
- Create an xfs file system
mkfs.xfs /dev/vdb
- Create a btrfs file system
mkfs.btrfs /dev/vdb
- Optional: Create a mount directory, such as /media/vdb.
If this step is omitted, you can also attach the disk to an existing directory.
mkdir /media/vdb
- Attach the disk to the mount directory.
mount /dev/vdb /media/vdb
- Run the df command to view the data disk information.
The mount directory information of the disk is displayed, indicating that the operation
was successful.
[root@ecshost ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 798M 2.9M 795M 1% /run
/dev/vda1 40G 3.2G 35G 9% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0G 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 798M 0 798M 0% /run/user/0
/dev/vdb 98G 61M 93G 1% /media/vdb