Jonathan Berry wrote:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:05:23 -0600, Aleksandar MilivojevicYes, it's a 160 GB *hard disk*. Actually, I've already done the fdisk and mkfs, and the results are fine.
<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
That being said, could you define the difference between a USB *storage device* (flash disk) and a *hard drive*? Is a "flash disk" the small "stick" devices that go into a USB slot and hold (generally) 256 Meg - 1 GB of data? The reason I ask...I have one of those, and they seem to work equally well on both XP machines or with Fedora. However, when I got this 160 GB hard drive I found it was FAT 32 and I could not write to it without the conversion steps I went through. (fdisk and mkfs).
Your thoughts??
