On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 13:04 +1100, Simon Slater wrote: > G'day again, It must be my day for questions. This more for filling in > the blanks than problem solving. > > I'm thinking of getting a Maxtor OneTouch IV 250GB external drive, so I > googled other peoples experiences. On 2 sites (below) I found similar > explanations of the steps to get one working under Linux. Both say to > reboot between fdisk and mkfs. Why? > > 1/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hnarayan/maxtor-harddrive-linux.html > 2/ http://www.totalpenguin.com/content/view/25/40/ > Well, the first link seems a little confused how partitioning works, but the second one seemed a little better. Anyway, I have not tried to use one of these "OneTouch" drives myself, but the external USB drives I have purchased and used have been substantially easier to work with. First, most of these drives will probably come already partitioned and formatted with either FAT32 or NTFS as filesystems. If your intent (as mine was) is to use the drive exclusively with Linux, I would prefer to format it "ext3". Anyway, if you do not need to "modify" the partition table, then don't. But, when you modify a partition table on a drive that is already read into the kernel's memory, when you "write" from fdisk, it will generate a warning message suggesting that you reboot to get the kernel to recognize your new partition table. You can see what the partition table on the physical drive is by running: "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" where you would substitute the appropriate dev name based on what was recognized when you attached the drive to your system (perhaps by reading dmesg or /var/log/messages or the console output). You can see what partitions the kernel has recognized by running "cat /proc/partitions". Now, as an alternative to "rebooting" after changing the table, you can run the command "partprobe", which can force the kernel to "re-read the partition table" from disk. But you cannot run mkfs on a partition that is not yet recognized by the kernel (meaning seen in /proc/partitions). So if fdisk generates the warning (meaning the table has been previously cached), then you need to either reboot or run "partprobe" before running mkfs. Hope that helps a little, --Rob
