I have a bit of an odd question. during my migration to linux which i have basicily stumbled through, i had to change my hard drives over from ntfs to ext3. i wanted ext3 because should i ever have to use windows i can ( with a handy little driver which i have forgotten the name of lol). to do this i mearly typed mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb . this is working fine but the problem is that the drive reports itself as no filesystem and just free space yet i have 180gb of stuff on there which i can acess read and write no problems. i have since become aware that i should used cfdisk to write the partition. i am not overly concerned about loosing data as i will back up before i do but really i would like to know the proper proceder to partition and format a drive the way i have done it on the other hard drive is to firstly do

cfdisk

and then

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc1

is this correct? and what do you think i should do regarding the other drive?

Thanks in advance

you can't make a filesystem on a raw block device like a drive, you need to put it inside a partition. or at least that's what the convetions say. once you've backed up the data, my way would be to do this...

as root run "fdisk /dev/hdb"
delete the partition table, if it even exists.
create a new partition, primary number 1, and make it full size
set the type to linux ext2 / ext3 (code 83 i think)
write the changes and exist
run "mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1" to create the ext3 partition correctly.
use.

thanks for that.

I was aware that you need partitions but when it was just working i had (stupidly) assumed that it had already partitioned it lol. o well learn from your mistakes i guess .

thanks again