I have just been givn a SATA HDD docking station. It takes 3.5" and 2.5" Sata drives of any capacity and provides a USB 2.0 output that can be plugged into a USB poert.
I run Fedora 12 64bit. When I plug the USB cable in the drive mounted in /media/disk

The Hard drive I have pluged in is and 80GB drive, It has an old copy of Fedora 11 on it. When it mounts it says that it is a 200 mB drive only. It has the ext3 fle system on it.

I can not copy any files to the drive I assume there is a permission error

What I am trying to find out is how
1. how do I find and remove the partitions that are on the drive
2. how do I reformat the full drive for the ext3 file system
3. how do I set teh permissions so the user and read and write to it

What I want to do is have the full 80GB available as just normal data file storage that I can add to and subtract from at will.

I also have a Sata drive with ext4 on it so how do I refomat that if I want to

Thanks

Check if you have "Gparted" in your linux system....and read the manual on it. It will do all you need regarding partitioning.

FYI the default Fedora installation creates two partitions i.e. /boot and an Logical Volume Management (LVM) which contains / and a swap partition. The 200MB is the old /boot. Its a little more involved mounting logical volumes.

As stated gparted would be a good choice since it is a graphical tool.

Make sure you unmount any partition associated with the drives your going to modify.

$ cat /proc/partitions

And other options.

# sfdisk -l
# cfdisk -l

Basically they list what you have. 200MB is likely one partition of many.

# cfdisk /dev/sda
(or whatever name / location suits that drive)

Should allow you to delete what's there and allocate something else.

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

Creates a new filesystem on the /dev/sda1 partition. Change filesystem and device name where appropriate.

# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
# mkdir /mnt/sda1/new_partition
# chown owner:group /mnt/sda1/new_partition
Change /etc/fstab to have defaults,user,noauto and whatever other options you want for that device.
# umount /dev/sda1

You cannot change the root partition to user perms on ext3, so they'll always have to work out of a modified directory with appropriate permissions. If it's just one user, you can use user:user on chown. Otherwise use an owner and group that meets your lowest common denominator among users. Or create a new group and put all users in it. Many means to an end.

Thanks for the assistnce. I do not know what I would do without such valuable and appreciated assistance.