USB External Drive

carlosinfl · 03-26-2007, 11:01 AM

Yup - finally went out to Newegg and purchased a 750GB internal drive which will fit nicely into my Vantec USB external enclosure. The drive slides into the enclosure and connects to my Linux box as a regular USB device.

I am simply going to format the entire drive as Ext3 since I only use Linux at home and work but my question is what is the best way to do so? Should I simply use "fdisk" or "QTParted" to format the drive?

dracolich · 03-26-2007, 05:19 PM

When I did the same thing for my 160GB Maxtor, I first ran cfdisk to create the patition and establish the filesystem. Then I used mkfs.*** where *** is the filesystem.

carlosinfl · 03-27-2007, 04:14 PM

If I use ext3 or vfat, will I always have a Lost & Found directory mounted on the USB drive?

dracolich · 03-27-2007, 04:40 PM

ext2/3 will create a lost+found, but vfat will not. Keep in mind vfat may have to make a few partition and will still have a 2GB file size limit.

carlosinfl · 03-27-2007, 05:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dracolich

ext2/3 will create a lost+found, but vfat will not. Keep in mind vfat may have to make a few partition and will still have a 2GB file size limit.

vfat has no problem utilizing my entire 60GB drive so I think you may be thinking about fat16 because my label ID in FDISK is "b" which is W95 FAT32.

Code:

Disk /dev/sdc: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1        7295    58597056    b  W95 FAT32

dasy2k1 · 03-28-2007, 08:12 AM

fat 32 still has a 4GB file size limit

i woudl just use Cfdisk to make a single partition and use
mke2fs -j to format as EXT3

carlosinfl · 03-28-2007, 08:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dasy2k1

fat 32 still has a 4GB file size limit

i woudl just use Cfdisk to make a single partition and use
mke2fs -j to format as EXT3

How do I set a disk label on it so when it gets mounted on any machine, it shows up as "usb_drive". Can I set the disk label on the actual device or does that have to be specified in /etc/fstab?