I just lost over 300gb of files due to my external hard drive crashing.
There was an error with the files system.
I tried formatting on Slackware but cfdisk didn't work for me.
I'm looking for something much easier with a GUI or something similar to the Disk Utility that you get in Ubuntu.
And also which format do I format my external harddrive to?
Something even more stable than ext4 or ntfs? Cause I do not want my external hard drive to crash again.

Hello,

You can have a look at GParted, that's pretty easy and straigtforward and they even have a LiveCD you can use to boot from.

Most of the currently used filesystems like ext3, ext4, reiserfs and the likes are considered pretty stable. Before 'blaming' the filesystem I think you should look first at WHY your external harddisk crashed. If for example it has a hardware failure or factory error, no matter what filesystem you put onto it, it will crash sooner or later.

Best practice to avoid data loss is still backup, backup, backup.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks for your reply, EricTRA.
I was thinking about downloading GParted but before doing something I rather ask someone
I will download GParted and post the results.

I had transferred a lot of data from a faulty computer and on to my external hard drive. And it became really slow, and crashed after a few days. Is it a hardware's fault or the files that I copied on to it?

run the fsck command on your external harddisk.

Hi,

You're welcome. It's hard to say what might be the cause of the crash without more information. When you've formatted the disk, run the fsck program on it, as indicated by basheer. Then try the copy operation again and keep an eye on log files (syslog, messages) for any errors in regards to your harddisk or its connection with your system. If it fails again (slows down), try copying smaller portions and not all at once to see if it has to do with the 'load' you're putting onto the harddisk.

Kind regards,

Eric

I see. The problem was I had copied an entire 100gb of files in bulk on to my external harddrive and only after that it started to get slow.
Now I shall try this part by part.
Thanks again

Hi,

No problem, hope it works out. Please let us know if it does.

Kind regards,

Eric

Sorry to hear that. I just accidentally deleted 16gb of files on my internal HD and that was bad enough.

I think the first rule of compuing is make a back up.

Second rule of computing is to make a second backup.

I have 2, different brand, 1TB external drives with the same media as each other. I have 3 pen drives with the same system files (fluxbox backup, system scripts, etc). God knows what I'd do if I lost the system files. *EDIT* actually I do, I have all the fluxbox settings and scripts in an openoffice .odt document, which is also backed up on my webspace.

Its good to be paranoid sometimes.