i want a new partition for external usb hdd, replace ntfs with ext4 with debian tools
 

Hi,

i bought a hhd toshiba 3tb external usb3.0, it's formated with ntfs and works fine with debian.

Now i would like to use ext4 and not ntfs anymore.

My disk utility palimpsest is not able to change the partition. There are differnt errors like:

error1)
the partition is misaligned by 512bytes. this may result in very poor performance .rapartitioning is suggested

error2)
Error creating partition: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_add_partition: device_file=/dev/sdb, start=0, size=1000000000000, type=0x83
Entering MS-DOS parser (offset=0, size=3000592982016)
MSDOS_MAGIC found
looking at part 0 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 1 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 2 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 3 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
Exiting MS-DOS parser
MSDOS partition table detected
containing partition table scheme = 0
got it
got disk
Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
ped_partition_new() failed


any suggestions ?

Try installing and using gparted instead of palimpsest for repartitioning/reformatting your hard drive . With a hd greater that 2TB you have to use GPT partitioning instead of the old MBR partitioning. Palimpsest does not support GPT last time I looked; Gparted does.

See this article for a good discussion on all things GPT and MBR:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-gpt/

it works, wonderful

thank you very much