formating external USB hard drive

[Terry Polzin]

On Friday 27 January 2006 09:03, François Patte wrote:
> Bonjour,
>
> 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.
>
> 2- Is the problem will be the same with an ext3 file system, and will
> udev/hotplug/hal recognize and automatically mount the device if I
> format it with mkfs.ext3?
>
> 3- How to format the external hd, for it has to unmounted before being
> formated?
Unmounted does not mean unrecognized by the system.  Remember partitions are 
mounted not the whole device.  Just fdisk the /dev/sdX device that udev sees.  
Remember that hard drives on the USB are treated as SCSI drives.