Issues trying to partition a USB drive

[Dr P Dupre]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, kevin kempter wrote:

> Hi List;
>
> I have a 320G SATA drive that used to have Fedora 8 on it, I no longer need 
> it as a main Linux drive so I want to use is as USB storage.
>
> However I'm having issues trying to fdisk the drive into a single partition.
>
> Here's what I did :
> 1) put the drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure
> 2) plugged the USB into my Fedora box
> 3) as root ran 'fdisk /dev/sdb'
> 4) removed all partitions on the drive and wrote the changes
>
> 5) rebooted my Fedora box
> 6) ran 'fdisk /dev/sdb' again
>
> at this point I get this if I print the partition table:
>
> Command (m for help): p
>
> Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> Disk identifier: 0x0000733a
>
>
> 7) added a single partition:
> - choose 'p' for primary partition
> - choose '1' for partition number
> - choose '1' for the first cyllinder
> - choose '38913' for the last cyllinder
>
> Like this:
>
> Command (m for help): n
> Command action
> e   extended
> p   primary partition (1-4)
> p
> Partition number (1-4): 1
> First cylinder (1-38913, default 1): 1
> Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-38913, default 38913): 38913
>
>
> 8) wrote the changes (w)
> 9) I went back into fdisk and printed the partition table:
>
> Command (m for help): p
>
> Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> Disk identifier: 0x0000733a
>
> Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdb1               1       38913   312568641   83  Linux
>
>
> 10) rebooted the Fedora box again
>
> 11) plugged in the USB drive
>
> KDE asks what to do - I say open in a new window.
> What I see is the data from my old /boot file system
>
> Also now if I do a 'df -h' I see the second (USB) drive as only the size of 
> the old /boot file system (1.9G) not the 320G I expect to see:
>
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
>                            48G   35G   11G  77% /
> /dev/sda1             190M   19M  162M  11% /boot
> tmpfs                    506M  364K  505M   1% /dev/shm
> /dev/sdb1             1.9G   52M  1.8G   3% /media/-boot1
>
>
> What am I doing wrong ?
Probably you need to format the partition: see mke2fs
-- 
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Patrick Dupré                                             pd520 at york.ac.uk
University of York                                 Department of Chemistry
Heslington, York              YO10 5DD                      United Kingdom
Phone: +44-(0)-1904-434384                        Fax: +44-(0)-1904-432516
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