Since i go my Slacware working again, I brought an external harddrive for backing up my files and also transfering files to and from other computers. But because this hard drive is Mac/ windows compatable I was wondering if anyone has any ideas of how to install and make this drive show up in my system??

The file system is NFTS or something, and i know that it won't work on linux systems, is there a way you can partition an external harddrive so that it is recognisable for the linux system

I'm a newbie so forgive me if i gave out wrong info

Usually usb hard drives show up as /dev/sda1 and so forth. As for partitioning, you could use Partition Magic or something similar to resize the NTFS partition. The real question is why is a drive with no OS installed (assumed) formatted in NTFS? If it could be formatted in Fat32 then it could be used to back up both Windows and Linux machines.

Well plug in your external device

Do a fdisk -l you should then see you drives like this.

bash-2.05b# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hde: 2012 MB, 2012774400 bytes
64 heads, 63 sectors/track, 975 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 = 2064384 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 1 975 1965599+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60040544256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7299 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 608 4883728+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda2 * 609 7299 53745457+ 83 Linux

then mount which one it is. you may also have to make a directory for it in you fstab. Just do a search here in the forums for fstab and you will find all you answers man.

Keep in mind unless compiled into the kernel (dangerous) NTFS filesystems are read-only to Linux.

thanks I'll try it