[PLUG] Format?

[Eric Wilhelm]

# from John Jordan
# on Thursday 08 December 2005 04:52 pm:

>> Make sure the drive is not mounted.
>
>I don't know how to do that, but read on ...

Ouch!  Stop.  Make _sure_ the drive is not mounted.

umount /dev/sda1

Of course, your distro may have an automounter.  Anybody's guess as to 
how nice that plays with command-line partitioning/formatting tools.  
(Eek!)  Maybe what you really want is to find the graphical utility for 
this (assuming that it can disable the automounter.)  Do you know how 
to disable the automounter?

>> Use "fdisk /dev/sda" (or whatever it is called) to change the
>> partition type to ext2.  (Just delete the old partition and create a
>> new one.  it will automatically be ext2.)
>
>I did that, and got a message:
>
>"The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 7296
>There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024
>and could in certain setups cause problems with:
>1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
>2) booting and partitioning soiftware from other OSs
>    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

That means what it says and you'll see it just about any time you run 
fdisk.

>Command (m for help):"

Yeah, fdisk is not the best user-experience available.  I've always 
thought that cfdisk is a bit more discoverable, but if you don't know 
whether the disk is mounted, you're bound to have some problems.

--Eric
-- 
But as soon as you hear the Doppler shift dropping in pitch, you know
that they're probably going to miss your house, because if they were on
a collision course with your house, the pitch would stay the same until
impact. As I said, that's one's subtle.
--Larry Wall
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