external disk formatting

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 13:25 +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.  Then I found parted but I keep getting error messages saying that it doesn't allow partitions outside the disk.

fdisk is the beast you want.  We're assuming the drive is treated as
SCSI (and if it's USB, Firewire or SCSI it will be), and that it's the
first drive other than your IDE drives.  If that's the case, the device
name will be /dev/sda.  So, as the root user, enter:

	# fdisk /dev/sda

"m" will give you a list of the existing partitions on the drive (if
any).  Use the "d" command to delete the existing partitions.  Use the
"n" command to create new ones.  When you're all done, use the "w"
command to write the new partition table to the drive and exit fdisk.

The partitions will be named "/dev/sda1", "/dev/sda2" and so on.  To
format them with the ext3 filesystem, again as root, use:

	# mke2fs -j /dev/sda1

and so on.  Once that's done, create some directories where you want
these new partitions to appear, and

	# mount /dev/sda1 /new/directory

Voila!

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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