format external drive
 

i have 3 x 300 gb ext seagate drives. when i connect them to my pc it says cant mount ntfs volume. how do i format these drives to be mounted for my linux box

Hi,

Which Linux Distribution you are using?

give full output of the error,

it might be because there is no ntfs support in your linux distro, in this case installing ntfs support or doing a good old
"mkfs.ext3 /dev/<devicename>" will solve it

it might because of some flag or mark set in the partition, for example when you interrupt a scandisk or another windows HDD tool mount command rejects to mount that partition. Forcing the mount with "-o force" is the solution of this case(eg: "sudo mount /dev/sda1 ./external1 -o force")

Hi

You don't technically "format" a disk but rather you format partitions.

If you're using RHEL/Fedora/CentOS or some similar Red Hat variant you would use the fdisk utility.

From the sounds of your post, you already have a Windows partition on the external drive you are trying to format.

To see all the media that your OS has detected:

Once you find the drive that you want to partition:

This will take you into a menu that will show you a whole lot of information about the selected disk; and you can then proceed to add/delete partitions on the disk.

A very good example of using fdisk can be found here.

I must caution you though when using fdisk; it will literally do what you tell it to; which can be disasterous if you are not sure of what you're doing. Thus it could easily for example delete your /boot partition or even your / partition.

I suggest you read the tutorial and post the output of the fdisk -l here - so we can assist further.

it will make the drives non-readable in windows environments - it's a problem for you, OP?
If so, a: may solve it, since vfat is natively supported by linux from ages ago, and file permissions are a "no need" for this kind of data exchange :P