How to Mount a Second Hard Drive on Debian

Allocating the extra space has made active a part of the disk that is on it's way out. Identify which drive is making the noise and replace it immediately.

This is what I did:

1. stop MySQL server
2. mount /dev/sda1 to /data (remember adding it to /etc/fstab)

3. create directory structure:

   mkdir -p /data/var/lib

4. move MySQL datadir to new folder:

   mv /var/lib/mysql /data/var/lib/

5. change the owner:

   chown -R mysql:mysql /data/var/lib/mysql

6. create a symlink to the old location:

   ln -s /data/var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql

7. open 2 consoles (I like the splitting feature in GNOME Terminator) one start MySQL server while another tail -f /var/log/mysqld.log.

This avoid to move datadir twice and you can use /dev/sda1 for the other purposes.