I have a HP Pavilion ze4300 laptop (40G) and a Seagate external HD (160G). The external HD has the filesystem of ext3 and I would like to change this all.

I first want to partition the external HD into 2 different partitions - an ext3 filesystem and a fat32 or ntfs filesystem.

At the current point in time I am making backups of the information contained on the external HD, but will very shortly be ready to make these partition and filesystem changes.

My question is how do I go about doing all of this? I am using Breezy and am relatively new to linux, so detailed instructions would be very helpful. Also, which filesystem is better for the newly partitioned "windows" section? NTFS or Fat32?

[My reason for all this trouble: I'm going to be duel booting from my laptop, so I would like to still access all my music, pictures, and documents from Windows.]


Thank you,

Ruth

Fisrt I would make the two partitions using either fdisk or cfdisk. The make one ext2 and the other fat32. Make the first one fat32 as well. Reason is both linux and windows can read and write to fat fine. One can write to NTFS in linux but it is not gauranteed. There are many post here on that subject. Reading NTFS is fine, writting to one can totally trash the partition. Now once you made each partition and define the partition type from the fdisk command. mkfs.ext2 for ext2 and mkfs.vfat for fat32 partition.

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda2

Brian1

You can discover how to do this by first reading:

man df
man fdisk
man mkfs
man mount

Come back here with more specific questions once you have done these things and tried to accomplish your purpose.

--- rod.

Concur with making the drive all FAT32---easy to share date between Windows and Linux.

"man fdisk" will tell you more than you wanted to know about partitioning....

Instead of reformatting my external HD, is it possible to install another driver in Windows that will allow me to read and write to my ext3 external HD?

I saw this link and am wondering if any of you have tried this or know if it works.

http://www.fs-driver.org/


Thanks.

I guess it work. I have never used it. Also if you do then make sure it is formatted as ext2 and not as ext3. One good thing in ext2 is if you delete a file at least you can recover it. Not very easily done in an ext3 filesystem if at all.

Brian1