external disk formatting

[Mike Pepe]

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.
> 
> 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.
> 

Mike,

I'm going to assume this is a USB disk.

USB disks appear to Red Hat as a SCSI disk. look at the /proc/scsi/scsi 
file and it should list all the SCSI devices on the system. First scsi 
disk is /dev/sda, second /dev/sdb, etc.

Once you figure out which disk it is, run fdisk with that argument, such 
as fdisk /dev/sda

delete the windows partition

create linux partition or partitions

write the new partition table, fdisk will quit

then you can make the filesystems, example, mke2fs -j -m0 /dev/sda1

after that's done, you can mount it like any other filesystem on a SCSI 
disk.

Might be a good idea to use the -L (label) option either during mke2fs 
or tune2fs afterwards, since USB devices tend to move around if you add 
others. (sda may become sdb, etc)

Also if you add the entry to /etc/fstab to automatically mount at boot, 
make sure it doesn't automount at boot time. Reason being- if the disk 
is not present when the system boots and the filesystem is marked in 
/etc/fstab as mount at boot, it will come up in single user mode and ask 
you to fix the filesystem. If you don't auto-mount at boot it will 
actually mount it later in the boot process, but if absent it won't 
prevent the rest of the system from coming up.

I'm sure others will have better suggestions.