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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