Determine if a disk or partition is ready for use by MapR

Explains the procedure to determine whether a disk or partition is ready for use by MapR.

About this task

Any disk or partition that passes the following testing procedure can be added to the list of disks and partitions passed to the disksetup command.

  1. Run the command sudo lsof <partition> to determine whether any processes are already using the disk or partition.

    There should be no output when running sudo fuser <partition>, indicating there is no process accessing the specific disk or partition.

  2. The disk or partition should not be mounted, as checked via the output of the mount command. If the disk or partition is mounted, unmount it using the umount command.
  3. The disk or partition should not have an entry in the /etc/fstab file; comment out or delete any such entries.
  4. The disk or partition should be accessible to standard Linux tools such as mkfs. You should be able to successfully format the partition using a command like sudo mkfs.ext3 <partition> as this is similar to the operations that MapR performs during installation. If mkfs fails to access and format the partition, then it is highly likely that MapR will encounter the same problem.