formating external USB hard drive

[Tim]

On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 15:03 +0100, François Patte wrote:

> I have a USB hard drive and 3 questions:
> 
> 1- I suppose that this hd is dos-formatted by default. Is it because 
> this that I had a problem of file size limitation? I couldn't create a 
> file more than 4.2Gb.

I don't know the filesize limit for DOS, but I thought it was less than
that.  If you need to store large files, it's well worth your while to
find out what the size limits are for the filing systems available to
you (and use the one best suited).

> 2- Is the problem will be the same with an ext3 file system, and will 
> udev/hotplug/hal recognize and automatically mount the device if I 
> format it with mkfs.ext3?

I can't see why not.  Hal cares about hardware being plugged and
unplugged.  After that comes determining how to mount it.

If you're about to reformat the drive, and therefor don't have to keep
contents on the drive, you can test both of the above queries, yourself.

> 3- How to format the external hd, for it has to unmounted before being 
> formated?

Unmount it (e.g. umount command, note that for some really stupid reason
someone decided to make the command umount not unmount--typical lazy
unix typists...), configure partitions if you need to (e.g. fdisk, or
other utilities), then format it (e.g. mkfs)

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