After installing a new hard drive, you have to follow a few steps to make it usable on your Linux system. Be sure not to erase an existing file system.

• (1) Identify the disk “fdisk -l“

fdisk -l

• (2) Partition the disk with fdisk or cfdisk

cfdisk /dev/sdX

• (3) Create the filesystem (format the disk) on each created partition. To create an ext4 filesystem on partition /dev/sdXY run:

mkfs.ext /dev/sdXY

• (4) Define the mount point for the newly created filesystem editing fstab:

nano /etc/fstab

Add the line for the newly created filesystem. I prefer to refer to it by UUID and not by device ID (these might change). Get the ID using this command “cd /dev/disk/by-uuid” and “ls -l”.

/dev/disk/by-uuid/3a9128c0-c9c2-47e7-b9f0-edc049ff4d3f /data ext4 defaults 0 1

source: https://superuser.com/questions/872257/how-to-make-a-new-disk-usable-on-ubuntu-linux