[PLUG] Dumb disk formatting question

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:26:05 -0700
Larry Brigman <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:

>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.

Thanks.

It was definitely not mounted, but Palimpsest still would not format
it. And mkext4.fs returned error "no such command." But after a quick
read of man mkfs I realized that I needed mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdd. It
worked without issue and Palimpsest now reports it as ext4. Mission
accomplished. 

Strange about Palimpsest. It has always worked fine for me before. Once
again the command line proves superior to the GUI.