I have a task at hand it seems.

To start I am a "newbie",.....

And to get to it,..The 250gb SimpleTech ExternalHD I have is needing to be reformatted to an ext3 filing system.

I have used:

kbrock@laptop03:~$ sudo mkfs.ext3 / dev / sdb
[ sudo ] password for kbrock:
mkfs.ext3: invalid blocks count - dev

and I also tried

kbrock@laptop03:~$ sudo mkfs.ext3 / dev / sdb1
[ sudo ] password for kbrock:
mkfs.ext3: invalid blocks count - dev


So as you can see this Invalid Blocks Count is possibly keeping me.

To add, a reply of ,"use Gparted" is appreciated, but no thanks.
I would rather use line command.



Truly Yours,

The Hunter

With the external drive plugged in and powered up, post the output of:

# sudo fdisk -l

That will list all the drives detected by your system, whether they are mounted or not. That way you can be sure you are dealing with the right device files.

In addition, you should not attempt to format a partition if it is mounted. Ubuntu normally automounts external hard drives so you will have to run:

$ sudo umount <insert device file>

before running the mkfs.ext3 command. Finally, I don't know whether it's just a typing or text formatting thing but you shouldn't have spaces like this:

/ dev / sdb1

It's suppose to look like this without those spaces:

/dev/sdb1

Having the spacing in the device file you have in your post will result in a error, i.e. / dev / sdb1 is not equal to /dev/sdb1.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Just wanted say thanks all around.

For being my first post I will say it was successful.

For starters the correction on how I was typing.
*lol,....that was a BIG help. =D

With that correction I was able to utilize community documentation. To complete all that I needed.

1. Reformat existing partition to ext3 from hpsf/ntfs
2. rsync

Done Done and Done.

Thanks again Kilgoretrout.



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