On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:05:23 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> wrote: > Terry Linhardt wrote: > > If I understand, I can do an fdisk, re-write the partition as a Linux > > partition, and then do an an mkfs -j . > > Yes. That is exactly what you need to do. I don't know how USB storage > devices are organized (if they have partitions at all, if they are > optional or mandatory). It might be that you don't need partitions > defined on the USB device at all, in which case you could just create > file system on it, as you would do if it was floppy. > > If there's partition table on the USB device, than you can simply change > partition's system ID from FAT32 to Linux (83) using fdisk. If fdisk > prints bunch of errors, when you start it, than there wasn't a partition > table on the device (just like on good old floppies). In that case, > forget about fdisk part, just use mkfs to build file system. > To me it sounded like this is a USB hard drive, but that has not been made clear. If it is a USB *storage device* (aka, flash disk) then I would be careful about messing with the partitions on it. I know one that I have is setup strangely, but it may need to be that way in order to function. It has support for passwords and other stuff (which I'm not using) and fdisk-ing it *might* mess something up. If this is a USB *hard disk* you should be able to partition and format it like any other hard disk. I guess I could be wrong here (I don't have a USB hard disk), but it makes sense to me that it should be the same. At in this case, yes, Terry is correct: fdisk to change partition type (or repartition as desired), and make the file system (I've always used "mke2fs -j" but it sounds like "mkfs -j" is the same thing). Jonathan
