Hi folks!

Since I'm talking specifically about a hard drive I thought this should be a hardware issue knowing it's really a file system issue. So here's m trouble -

I've a one terabyte WD green drive that I've connected to an external dock. I formatted it FAT32 not even thinking about file size issues ... so after 108 GB of data I realized I needed a native Linux file system - JFS, ext3, etc...

So I moved my data off the drive and tried various linux file systems and all give me the same issue: due to what I'm assuming are unknown permissions on the drive I can neither read nor write to the drive. I don't use windows at all any longer and have no desire/need for NTFS (I even tried this and my drive would no mount even with NTFS-G3 installed)

I am not picky about what file system goes on the drive so long as it's Linux native and can support any file size (larger than four gigabytes)

as I'm a newb to file system in general I'd like a step-by-step on exactly what I need to so as to not make the same mistakes over and over again and so I don't have to keep buggin' y'all for help. Thanks so much! This site has helped me leave windows behind! Oh, I should also mention that my OS is ubuntu 9.04 Thanks!

Scott

It's not hard, as long as you've got your data backed up. You can run the fdisk command, and remove the other partitions (something like "fdisk /dev/sdb", or whatever your external drive comes up as). Don't do a partition on the disk (like "fdisk /dev/sdb1"), but the entire drive. Then remove the old partitions (type "help" when you get in the fdisk prompt), and create new ones. Once they're created, you just format them, with the mkfs command, like "mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1". That's it...enjoy.

And hello from Birmingham.

O.K. I have not tried your suggestion and am keeping it handy. I was wondering if there was any way I could do this within GParted? I'm more familiar with it. I'm not too comfortable in the terminal but am willing to go there if it gets the job done.

P.S. if you're ever in Tuscaloosa you should stop by my computer shop!

~ Scott

Not sure, since I hardly ever use Gparted... The fdisk command is very, VERY close to the old DOS fdisk command (don't know if you're old-school, like me), so it's quite easy to figure out. If you fire up fdisk, just type in "m" for help (prompts are on the screen). It really just takes a few keystrokes to partition a drive.

Making the file system is easy too...if your device was /dev/sdb, and you made two partitions on it, you'd then run "mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1" and "mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb2". That's it...partitioned and ready to use....

If you get really stuck, drop me a note...I'm not that far away.