[PLUG] Format?

John Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Dec 8 23:16:06 UTC 2005


I bought one of those little shirt-pocket size USB hard disks to 
make backups of my laptop to. It holds 60 Gb, which is also the 
same size as the laptop hard disk. 

When I tried it (with Dump) it got 4 Gb written and then the terminal 
window gave me an error message that the file was too big. Of 
course, silly me. When I checked, the drive had been pre-formatted 
at the factory with Fat32. 

Since this will be used exclusively with the laptop, which has only 
Ubuntu on it, I decided I want to reformat with Ext3. But I don't 
know how to do that. Ubuntu has a dialog box under System > 
Administration > Disks that has a button for Format, but the button 
is grayed out for this drive. Strangely it is NOT grayed out for the 
laptop's drive. Like it won't let me format unused external media, 
but it WILL let me format the disk containing the whole operating 
system.

The drive is mounted as /media/DATASTOR. I tried man format, but 
got a message "No manual entry for format." I also tried System > 
Help, only to be reminded that Ubuntu's Help is broken. It always 
pops up a window that says "The application 'yelp' has quit 
unexpectedly." I've never been able to see the Help files.

So where do I find out how to format this new disk?



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