On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 22:32 -0400, Robert Locke wrote: > > 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 > Thanks everyone, I understand a bit better now. -- Regards Simon
