external disk formatting

[Mike Markiw III]

Hi all,

I'm trying to get a Red Hat ES 4 install up and running using an external hard drive for additional storage. The drive came out of the box formatted with fat32. However, fat32 doesn't support UNIX-style partitions so I hooked it up to a windows machine and formatted to ntfs. I installed the ntfs kernel module only to find out that it doesn't support write/delete operations, only read.

I'd like to just do a format to ext2 from the RHEL box, but I've never done anything like that before. Usually, the only formatting I do is at OS-install time.

I found fdisk, though that didn't seem to be the correct program. Then I found parted but I keep getting error messages saying that it doesn't allow partitions outside the disk.

Can anyone offer any advice or assitance? Surely there must be a simpler way to format a disk!

Thanks in advance,
-Mike Markiw
Oracle Technology Consultant
Tier1, Inc.