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 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 The warning in the fdisk man page about drive sides is a bit outdated.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 > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss