[PLUG] Dumb disk formatting question

Larry Brigman larry.brigman at gmail.com
Fri Mar 15 03:26:05 UTC 2013


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 8:11 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> My replacement 3 TB Go Flex Desk USB drive arrived today from Seagate.
> I don't know how it is formatted (probably FAT32 or NTFS), but I want
> to reformat it EXT4. Looking at it in Palimpsest there are options to
> format the drive, but none seem to actually format the drive. Sometimes
> I am asked if I want to partition the drive.
>
> I know zero about how hard drives or partitions work. The drive will
> just be used for external storage. Does it need a partition? Is that
> why I can't seem to format it?

You never truly low level format modern drives.  If you don't want to
partition it,
just run mkext4.fs on the raw /dev/sdX device.

You will need to make sure that Linux didn't already automount it.
That could be why you
cannot put a new file system on it.



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