On Friday 23 March 2007, Daniel Jensen wrote: >I purchased an external drive (250GB) and would like to format ext3 to >use for back-ups or additional storage. Since, I'm new to Linux not >sure how to start the process. Any help would be greatly appreciated... First, do a 'df' from a shell, which will show you the currently mounted drives so that you can make sure you are not accidentally formatting your system drive as that might be embarrasing. Then start a "tail -f /var/log/messages" so you can watch it in real time as you plug this drive in. Note where the drive shows up this tail of the messages log when you plug it in. Cancel any automount requestor's thrown up. The find a shell, become root and do 'fdisk /dev/name-from-messages-log', where this name-from-messages-log will probably something in the sda through sdf set of devices. We'll use sdb here since sda has a small chance of being the system drive if all your internal drives are SATA drives. When its up, hit p once to see what the drives says it is now. Probably some M$ format. I'd assume it only has one partition showing so hit a 't'. fdisk will ask you for the partition number, give it a 1 for the first one, and a new partition type number, and linux ext2/3 is a type 83 so enter that and hit the return. Do another 'p' and verify it was changed correctly. If it was, hit 'w' which will actually do the write to the drive and exit after doing a synch operation so the kernel knows it has this new partition. If it doesn't exit, hit a 'q' and it should. Now its an ext drive, but its not yet formatted, so, Still as root, do: mke2fs -j /dev/name-from-messages-log but append a 1 to the devicename to indicate the first partition. This will install the ext3 filesystem on that partition. Now its a mountable drive/partition, so do: mkdir /mnt/sdb1 <make this the same name as above but with the partition # And then: mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 Now the drive should be usable, and its capacity should show up as a new entry in the 'df' report when a df is run. HTH -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) "Elvis is my copilot." -- Cal Keegan
