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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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Old 02-17-2005, 09:19 PM   #1
highspeednodrag
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Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Silicon Valley
Distribution: Debian, Mepis, Kanotix
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Formatting External USB Drive Question


I'm trying to format an external drive (Acomdata 238 Gig) to my RH 9.0 laptop so I can backup data and then do a clean install. I try to format using fdisk and get the message "command not found" when issuing the following command:

fdisk /dev/sda1

When I boot from Knoppix 3.3 and use QTParted I find sda1 and sda5 but I can mount them as there does not yet appear to be a filesystem established on sda1 or sda5.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Thanks.
hs
 
Old 02-17-2005, 10:35 PM   #2
fibbi
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Registered: Sep 2003
Distribution: gentoo
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if you get 'command not found', you're likely not running as root (fdisk is a command in /sbin). Moreover though, fdisk is not likely what you want. fdisk is a partioner, and thus fdiscking a single partion (rather than plain ole sda) will not get you the desired results. Instead, you want to use mkfs.[YOURDESIREDFS] /dev/sda[PARTITION NUMBER]

fdisck the drive first to get the partitions the way you want, and then use mkfs format it with the desired fs.
 
  


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