Newbie settting up an externel hard drive

seano · 02-05-2008, 11:24 AM

I am running Linux Red Hat Version 2.6.9-42ELsmp and want to setup an external hard drive. Can anyone tell me the best format and type fo drive should i use for this? Can anyone forward me the protcol to add this new device to the system itself?

budword · 02-05-2008, 01:04 PM

What do you mean by type of drive ? USB vs Firewire you mean ? Ext3 is the default file system for most linux distros. Just plug in the drive, bring up qtparted or gparted, and click the buttons. Most external drives will come already formatted with fat32, which you can use just fine with linux, but it does have a 2 gig file size limit, which ext3 doesn't have.

What distro and desktop are you using ? You won't have to edit any other files if you are using KDE I know, and gnome should auto mount it for you too.

David

Samotnik · 02-05-2008, 04:05 PM

Any drive type will be working fine - you only need to adjust your udev rules to assure assigning a constant devname for a drive, any time you plugh it in.
And surely you should reformat it in some modern journalling filesystem