[wplug] Linux Compatible External Drives

Shawn Zier shawnzier at imapmail.org
Wed Feb 6 08:07:36 EST 2008


beer,

There really isn't a great magnitude of work involved. Your debian install 
probably already has the tools to reformat the drive. 

First, you might want to stop hald. Sometimes it will try to automount your 
drive once you format it. 

The following commands must be run by the root user:

/etc/init.d/hald stop

fdisk /path/toDevice     
press n for a new partition
1 for partition number
Hit enter twice to accept size defaults-- this will format the entire 500G
"w" to write changes

mke2fs -j /path/toDevice

/etc/init.d/hald start

Your drive should  now automount if youre logged into a desktop environment.

Even for a 500GB drive, this should only take 5-10 minutes.

All drives can be encrypted.

I would suggest that if you're only going to use the drive with your linux box 
to format it with an ext3 filesystem. It's much more robust than fat32. 

If, however, you need to use it with other platforms, such as linux or osx, 
you should leave it formatted as fat32.

Hope that helps.

Best Regards,

Shawn


On Tuesday 05 February 2008 02:37:24 pm beer at cmu.edu wrote:
> Hey kids, hope everyone is well.
>
> I was wondering if anyone knows of any good external drives that support
> linux out of the box?
>
> I need something that is 500G, and preferably supports both usb and
> firewire, but I can do without the firewire.  If it had a usuable
> encryption option that would also be swell.
>
> I've done some searches and I find drives that OS X and Solaris compatible
> out of the box but none yet that support linux.
>
> I know I can just reformat the drive and all, but given the magnitude of
> the work I need this for, I want to have to do as little as possible to the
> drives before I can use them.
>
> TIA
>
> -b




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