external disk formatting

[Bob McClure Jr]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 10:22:49AM -0500, Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> 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

Whoops.  Make that

  mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
  mke2fs -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.

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