How to format a new external drive?
 

I want to know what commands to use in suse 10.2 to format 300 GB drive to use exclusively for suse possibly as ext3, but accept any better ideas. I don't want to partition it, but use it as a whole volume. Thanks a lot for your help. I already have 3 external drives for Windows, recognized and mounted by suse with read only. They are ntfs.

Plug it in ... if it is not already partitioned and formatted, chances are SUSE will ask if this is what you want to do. Failing that, look in the logs or mtab for which block special device the drive gets assigned to.

You can use fdisk -l to check for the external drive. fdisk or gparted will partition it, you want one partition occupying the entire drive. It is common to make this a logical partition but I've got one that is a primary partition.

It is very easy to do - just follow instructions with these tools.

BTW; you can write to those ntfs drives after installing ntfs-3g from yast.

I'm trying to get Gparted to recognize my external hard drive, but even though Ubuntu knows it's there, Gparted doesn't put it in the menu that contains my OS hd's. Is it located somewhere else?

I've tried reformatting the external HD through Windows, but Windows will only let me do NTFS. Is this because the hardware will only allow NTFS, or is there any way to make this thing FAT32?

For all concerned, I went into Windows and deleted the pre-existing ntfs. Then after booting Gparted again, it finally recognized the drive now that it had no partitions at all. Gparted *did* allow me to make it ANY file format I could dream of, including FAT32.

I think it must be one of Billy's schemes or just plain lameness that Windows would only list NTFS.

So all I can say is:
M$ sucks in yet another respect.

when you format in windows it should let you do FAT32 or NTFS, unless your on vista then i dont know.

Strangely, Nadroj, the only option in the drop-down box was NTFS. I was running Windows XP.

It's moot - gparted couldn't do anything because there was ntfs there and you had no driver. You could have deleted the partition in linux using fdisk, especialy if fdisk -l would list it.

Windows will make a fat32 partition from the dos command line.

You don't want windows to make a fat32 partition anyway - the tool is deliberately broken at the redmond end. Always use linux for partitioning.

Windows will not format (from the Disk Management system) any partition >=32GB as FAT32. Just a policy thing, really, the technical limitation on FAT32 is much larger (8 Terabytes). Admittedly, large filesystems without Journaling are probably not a great idea, but that's no reason to not allow it.

Hi guys! Thanks for your replies. Let mi tell you what I did; the drive didn't show up any where, except in Yast>Partitions. I deleted first to make sure. Then I use Create to make 1 partition ext3. You have to leave Options in blank. When Yasy finishes, you new drive appears mounted in your escritory.