Hi Terry, On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:15:56 -0600, Terry Linhardt <linhardt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Jonathan Berry wrote: > >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 > > > > > > > Yes, it's a 160 GB *hard disk*. Actually, I've already done the fdisk > and mkfs, and the results are fine. Very good. > 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? Yes, that is the what the flash disks are. These devices use flash memory (solid state) to store information. > 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?? You could not write to your disk with a FAT32 filesystem? That seems strange. Could you mount the device? Perhaps this was done by udev automatically if you have FC3, and perhaps it mounted it read only? I'm mearly speculating here. Did you get any errors? Did you try it with Windows at all? I guess what filesystem you use on it is fine, as long as you only want to use it with Linux. For Windows, you will need to have a FAT32 or NTFS fs on it. Linux can write FAT32 and read NTFS (limited write support). You could always do multiple partitions if you want. Jonathan
