Reformat WD 500 GB hard drive for Linux machine


 
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# 1  
Old 03-24-2010
Reformat WD 500 GB hard drive for Linux machine

Linux Red Hat machine
GNOME version 2.16.0

External hard drive is a Western Digital 500 GB My Book Essential.

How can I reformat the external hard drive so that I can backup my Linux machine?

Thanks
# 2  
Old 03-25-2010
Important note: Neither I nor any of the other moderators and administrators here will take responsibility for data lost due to not reading the whole post, and making sure the contents are understood.

Did you back up everything essential from the external disk? Are you sure? Absolutely?

Even if, what file system is on the disk? If it's FAT/FAT32/VFAT you can use it with Linux, up to a file size of 4GB (2^32 bytes). If you have FUSE or can get it to run, and install ntfs-3g, you'll have NTFS support, too.

Open a terminal session, connect the disk, and run dmesg. At the bottom of the output you should see some lines similar to this
Code:
usb 5-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
usb 5-4: new device found, idVendor=1516, idProduct=8628
usb 5-4: new device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 5-4: Product: USB 2.0 0806
usb 5-4: Manufacturer: A-JET
usb 5-4: SerialNumber: 20080125000000000000040A
usb 5-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access     A-JET    USB 2.0 0806     1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 16236544 512-byte hardware sectors (8313 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 16236544 512-byte hardware sectors (8313 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

Important is the bold line. The first tells us the device node it's presented as (sdb in this case), and that there's 1 partition on it (sdb1).
If it's only 1 partition (most probable), you can format it straight away as root:
Code:
$ su -
$ mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 # Replace sdb1 with the partition dmesg told you

After it's finished, disconnect and reconnect the drive, and the automounter of GNOME should pick it up just fine.
 
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