[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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