formating external USB hard drive

[John Summerfied]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 15:03 +0100, François Patte wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have a USB hard drive and 3 questions:
>>
>>1- I suppose that this hd is dos-formatted by default. Is it because 
>>this that I had a problem of file size limitation? I couldn't create a 
>>file more than 4.2Gb.
> 
> 
> I don't know the filesize limit for DOS, but I thought it was less than

WinXP Home stopped at 2 Gb for fat32.

> that.  If you need to store large files, it's well worth your while to
> find out what the size limits are for the filing systems available to
> you (and use the one best suited).
> 


> 
> Unmount it (e.g. umount command, note that for some really stupid reason
> someone decided to make the command umount not unmount--typical lazy
> unix typists...), configure partitions if you need to (e.g. fdisk, or
> other utilities), then format it (e.g. mkfs)
> 

Unmount the partitions, maybe
umount /media/usbdisk*
Repartition it with, for example, fdisk
Check that some bloody stupid automount thing didn't mount the new 
partitions. Shouldn't be possible, but who knows?
Create filesystems to suit.

I have several USB & firewire drives; the same basic procedure applies 
to Linux and Mac OS X and, one presumes, to others.


-- 

Cheers
John

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