hello all, this is my first post here, and i stumbled upon this site from google

I recently built a basic server computer for home use. (this will be for media, documents, music, etc) I have a basic amd mobo, cpu, and dvd drive. I have Ubuntu server 9.10 installed on an 8GB SD card that is attached to a usb dongle. The os loaded just fine And as a storage drive i have a seagate 1TB hard drive.

Then i got to creating shares in samba. I got to editing the smb.conf file and i couldn't figure out how to setup the shares (where exactly the 1tb Hard drive is, how to create directories and what not) Then i realized i needed to format the HDD! but when i go to run fdisk to finally do it, it tells me that it is "unable to open /dev/sda/"

now i don't know a whole lot about linux as you can tell, but that is the whole reason i set this thing up is for a big learning experience in both linux and network setup.

to sum up, how do i format the 1TB HDD, and how would i set up samba so i could administrate it from my other computer (SWAT is what i've read about)

big thanks in advance!

-cam

What does

fdisk -l

(lowercase L) say? NB: you have to be root to run it; in the case of Ubuntu, prefix with sudo:

sudo fdisk -l

well i poked around google some more and formatted the drive with "cfdisk" with filesystem type 82, which it says "linux" but i don't know if it's ext2,3,4, or w/e. but apparently it wiped the bootloader that was installed on the drive or something, because now the system won't boot.

It stays at a black screen with a blinking cursor.( no login prompt though)

so i'm going to reinstall and format the HDD from the installer.

i'll post back if i have any problems setting up shares or whatnot.

-Cam