I am wondering if any of you technical guys would be willing to format my Western Digital external USB 1.5 TB Hard Drive to Linux EXT3. I am naturally happy to pay for your time and trouble and for postage. The WD drive is for storing video footage and will be connected to my Humax Freesat HD Digital TV Box(not a computer), and the Humax Box will only record high deffination programmes in EXT3 format.

I've tried to do the job myself with my PC, but have failed to change my system to format in Linux.

Look forward to hearing from you if you can help.

Best wishes.........Paul

Could you be more specific about how you tried to format your external drive?

General way of formatting drive under linux is using: mkfs device

My advice just down load gparted live cd
Burn the down load as a iso a file
Restart you're computer with external drive connected en gparted will find you're external drive

I have a Windows XP PC computer and previously tried to download Linux to enable me to reboot my computer in Linux. I managed to open Linux, but before progressing further realised that my computer refused to restart again in Windows having lost it's boot sector. It cost me £100 to get it repaired, plus many further hours to reload all my programs!!!

I'm naturally nervious about repeating this experience, but still wish to format my Western Digital external USB drive to EXT3.

Using a Linux Live CD won't affect your hard drive on your XP system. It will run totally from the CD or DVD that it is on.

You can then plug in your external drive, mount it as writable, and format it.

Holy cow! 100 quid for a reinstall, is that the going rate these days?


Oh and make sure when using a livecd that you format the right hard drive, check the size of the drive in gparted.