-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Daniel Jensen a écrit : | 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... | Have you any reason why you want to change the file system on your drive? Usually these HD ara M$ formatted and so they can be use on every computer (sigh), so if you want to use it to make some exchange from your computer with a M$ one, you'd better keep it as it is. If you want it linux file system formatted it is quite easy to do (remember also that you will loose about 5% if you format in ext3, because of the journal, do you need ext3?): plug your drive, execute the df command to see on which device it is mounted. Assuming this device is /dev/sdd1 (df will return something like: /dev/sdd1 <some numbers...> /media/usbdisk) execute: umount /media/usbdisk then: mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1 That's all If you want to partition your disk, use fdisk, sfdisk, whatever... before formating each partition you have created. If you want to make exchanges with M$ systems, you culd format a partition of your drive as a M$ file system (mkfs.msdos) - -- François Patte UFR de mathématiques et informatique Université René Descartes http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGBKSjdE6C2dhV2JURAlaDAJ99AxEzv9ik6LP2yLSDEr62S5pnWACg1T+7 Nhfoex6rSj7cFHBwCu4Y8OE= =k7EJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----