Formatting an External Drive

[InertKinesis]

I'm posting this in the Newbie forum because I don't think it's distro-specific, and because I feel like a n00b asking it.

I have a 60 GB external HDD that I made from a Fujitsu laptop drive and a cheap casing from NewEgg. It works fine, but its partitioned as NTFS, so all I can do with it is read it. I want to be able to write to it, and then be able to connect it to a Windows rig and at least read, if not read and write.

How do I accomplish this? What file system does it need to have? What utility do I need to use? Btw, I'm running Sabayon Linux on an Alienware Aurora m9700 (laptop), although I may be switching to openSUSE in the next few days.

Thanks,
Mike

[sheryco]

Don't mean to sound obvious how are you connected to that external drive usb or serial?
If usb try typing in the CLI (command line interface)

#lsusb

this will list everything that is connected via usb.
Most of the time linux sees drives via usb as scsi so to check it drive identification check it with either

#fdisk -l
or
#dmesg | grep sd

Let us know what you find out.

[Dapper Dan]

Hi InertKinesis and welcome to Linuxforums.

Another option is to download and burn the Gparted live CD partitioning and formating utility. It's free. Set bios to boot from CD before HD, fire up Gparted and it will find all your drives. Then use the very intuitive interface to resize the NTFS and create a space for fat32.

[InertKinesis]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I've actually found the GParted website on my own, and I think that's what I'll do.

Linux is successfully recognizing the drive as USB, and as NTFS.

So you're saying that FAT32 will let me read/write with Linux and Windows? Aren't there some file size restrictions or something with FAT32?

[Dapper Dan]

So you're saying that FAT32 will let me read/write with Linux and Windows? Aren't there some file size restrictions or something with FAT32?

You can read and write to fat32 from Windows and Linux with ease. Just don't ever cut and paste large files to or from fat32 as you can loose everything in the twinkling of an eye. It happened to me. Always copy and paste to and from Linux file systems to fat 32 and back again. Then when the files are safely moved, you can go back and delete the originals. In my opinion, fat32 should only be used between the two operating systems as a central zone to move files through. For safe storage of valuable files, keep them on either NTFS or any of the Linux file systems, ReiserFS, EXT2, EXT3 etc.