External Hard Drive formatting

[Brant Evans]

There is also an Ext2 driver for Windows. It works great and will work
with an Ext3 partition as they are compatible.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Brant

On 6/28/07, Kurt Granroth <plug-discuss at granroth.org> wrote:
> Harold Michels wrote:
> > I have just purchased a 500GB Maxtor external USB HDD from Staples (On
> > sale at $129.00 plus tax through today).
> >
> > The Linux pages told me it would plug in and run out of the box. It
> > does, sort of.
> > It is being reported by my system (Fedora Core 6) as having been
> > formatted as NTFS.
> [big snip]
>
> Okay, the first thing to realize is that your external drive is pretty
> much indistinguishable from your internal drives as far as any
> filesystem or partitioning software goes.  If you are using a distro
> like openSUSE then I *strongly* recommend using YaST to do all of this.
>  It's all pointy-clicky and it's hard to screw things up.
>
> If you're determined to do things by hand, then read on.
>
> Your drive will mount via the SCSI drives and will show up as something
> like /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 or similar.  The drive, then, is /dev/sda
> and the individual partition is /dev/sda1.
>
> Step one is the repartition the drive.   Do you have data on the NTFS
> side?  If not, then might as well just nuke it and start from scratch.
> The warning in the fdisk man page about drive sides is a bit outdated.
> Any modern Linux distro on a system with a modern BIOS can easily handle
> a 500GB drive.
>
> So fdisk /dev/sda (remember to do the drive, not the partition).  I
> actually recommend using 'cfdisk' rather than fdisk since it's a tiny
> bit more user friendly.  It's a personal choice, though.
>
> parted works as well, especially if you do have data on the NTFS drive
> and want to preserve it.  Just make sure that you run it as 'parted
> /dev/sda' and not 'parted /dev/sda1'.  In a similar vein to cfdisk, I
> recommend using qtparted instead of parted.  It has the same
> functionality but wraps it in a very very easy to use GUI.
>
> Once your partitions are created, you use the 'mkfs' tools to create the
> filesystems on the partitions.  If you used fdisk, then you'll need to
> recreate the NTFS partition using 'mkfs.ntfs'
>
> /sbin/mkfs.ntfs /dev/sda1
>
> To create the ext3 linux partition:
>
> /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
>
>
> HTH
> Kurt
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