external disk formatting

[Bob McClure Jr]

If you would please, beat your mailer until it wraps lines every 72
chars or so.  I'll reformat this.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 01:25:58PM +0000, Mike Markiw III wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to get a Red Hat ES 4 install up and running using an
> external hard drive for additional storage.  The drive came out of
> the box formatted with fat32.  However, fat32 doesn't support
> UNIX-style partitions so I hooked it up to a windows machine and
> formatted to ntfs.  I installed the ntfs kernel module only to find
> out that it doesn't support write/delete operations, only read.
> 
> I'd like to just do a format to ext2 from the RHEL box, but I've
> never done anything like that before.  Usually, the only formatting
> I do is at OS-install time.
> 
> I found fdisk, though that didn't seem to be the correct program.

Why not.  That's what you need for setting up partitions.  Assuming
it's treated as a SCSI drive, and called /dev/sda,

  fdisk /dev/sda

After that's done, you should be able to

  e2fsck -j /dev/sda1
  e2fsck -j /dev/sda2
   .
   .
   .

> Then I found parted but I keep getting error messages saying that it
> doesn't allow partitions outside the disk.

Don't know what that's about.

> Can anyone offer any advice or assitance?  Surely there must be a
> simpler way to format a disk!
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> -Mike Markiw
> Oracle Technology Consultant
> Tier1, Inc.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure at earthlink.net  http://www.bobcatos.com
Peace at any price is inflationary.