Formatting and mounting a filesystem

In this recipe, you will be introduced to the standard CentOS filesystems XFS, Ext4, and Btrfs. Filesystems form one of the most fundamental parts of any operating system and nearly everything depends on them. Here, you will learn how to create different types of standard filesystems available in CentOS 7, and how to link them to your system so that we can access them afterwards for reading and writing. These two techniques are called formatting and mounting filesystems; while you do not do this very often, it remains one of the most fundamental Linux system administrator tasks.

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you will require a minimal installation of the CentOS 7 operating system with root access. We will also use virtual block devices instead of real disk devices because it's better to demonstrate the usage of creating filesystems and formatting disks using "dummy" devices, instead of erasing your real hard disk contents. Therefore...