those with little patience read no further. Help please, i am trying to find the correct (and easy) way to format and partition an external 160 GB hdd that i want to use to store backups of data on my linux machine and my m$ machine. I would like to have about 100 GB FAT32 and 60GB ext3. for some reason when i run the hardware browser, this drive is called SDB1 not hdd?? but whatever. I am thinking that i need to do something like Fdisk /dev/sdb1 mke3fs /dev/sdb1 how do i make a fat32 partition? where do i write the numbers of the beginning and ending sectors? do i have to name the two partitions? can i just pretend it's a floppy and use the gui?? haha. just kidding. i did get parted but it is way beyond my ability to figure out so i thought i'd give one last attempt by asking here, if it's still too beyond me then i'll just use ghost and use it only for m$, what a waste. but if you think that that is the best thing to do , i can handle that, let me know. help help. thanks again, did i mention that your response, if any, needs to be easy to understand??? thanks for hand-holding. i'm always available for any canine problems you have. -- betty i. www.WebCanine.com research & information for people who care for dogs --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss