What distro are you using? I am using SuSe and I use Yasts' Partitioner. 
The gui takes all the guess work out. The reason you are not seeing the 
drive as hdd is because the drive is connected by either a usb or other 
means. the hdd drices aro connected via ide.

betty wrote:

> 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.


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