formating external USB hard drive

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Sat Jan 28 12:32:31 UTC 2006


François Patte:
>>> 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?

Tim:
>> I can't see why not.  Hal cares about hardware being plugged and
>> unplugged.  After that comes determining how to mount it.

François Patte:
> With ext3 file system, the device is still automatically mounted; so
> far, so good!
> 
> But:
> 
> 1- the name has changed: from the brand name (Lacie) of the disk, it has
> move to "usbdisk". No harm, but I wonder why!

Most likely, the volume label of the disk was set to Lacie, and it has
one now.  Try setting one.

$ apropos label
e2label              (8)  - Change the label on an ext2/ext3 filesystem
findfs               (8)  - Find a filesystem by label or UUID
mlabel               (1)  - make an MSDOS volume label
ppmlabel             (1)  - add text to a PPM image

> 2- the first time I plugged it in, it was mounted as root.root with only
> write permission for root.... I changed the owner and the group without
> any problem, but now it is always this name and this group which is used
> when the disk is mounted. Where are defined these things?

For filesystems which have no notion of individually owned files on the
disc (e.g. MS-DOS, FAT), the drive is mounted as belonging to a
particular user.  Which could be the person who mounted it, or according
to uid and gid parameters in your /etc/fstab file.

For filesystems that do understand ownership, the drive should be
mounted with them being used as on the drive.  Of course, this means
that user 512 on the external drive must be the same as user 512 on the
local system, but if you only use the drive with your own system, that's
going to be the case, anyway.  That's more of an issue when you swap
drives between PCs.

For filesystems with ownership systems, that you want to share files
with, you need to make sure you make the files suitably readable as you
save them.  e.g. Group readable to a group common to both PCs, or world
readable, if applicable.

>> If you're about to reformat the drive, and therefor don't have to keep
>> contents on the drive, you can test both of the above queries, yourself.

> How could I go back to vfat file system? I have only linux machines.

It's just another type of formatting option.  Linux can make a VFAT
filesystem, if you want.

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