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Portable HDD on Linux

J

jonessoda

Golden Member
I have a Seagate portable hard drive that I plan to use under Linux only. It seems to be formatted as FAT32, because it only allows files of 4gb or below. So, I want to format it to ext2fs.

The disc shows up as /media/SEA_DISC. That's the only place I know for sure where it is, but I imagine it must show up under a different name somewhere.

Can I just do the following:

$ mkfs.ext2 /media/SEA_DISC?

It says:

/media/SEA_DISC is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway (y,n)?

Will it cause problems if I format it as such?

As for technical info, it's a Seagate 100g portable external HDD, and the OS is Xubunto 6.10.
 
/media/SEA_DISC is the location in the filesystem where the disk is mounted. What you want is the location of the block device corresponding to the disk.

Your drive will show up as /dev/sd?, where ? is the appropriate letter. If your computer has only IDE drives, the portable harddrive will almost certainly be /dev/sda. If you have SCSI or SATA drives already, it will be some other letter. /dev/sda corresponds to the entire disk, /dev/sda1 corresponds to the first partition(and probably the only, though you could check with fdisk). Run mkfs.ext2 against /dev/sd?1, with appropriate value for ? and you should be fine.
 
It'll be sdb/sdb1/sdb5 when it's in, apparently (the series of sda are my inbuilt HDD, I know for sure, and sdb showed up when I plugged this drive back in)... so I guess I should do:
$ mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb?

Edit: yeah, that worked... now to see if I can back up my HDD yet.

Edit 2: No... for some reason the max file size is still 4gb. Why, I wonder, is that happening?
 
I have no idea why that limit would be in place. Ext2 shouldn't have any problem with that.

Since you now have your external device playing just as nicely as an internal one, you might want to raise the question of your filesize limit in Operating Systems or Software. The former, particularly, is probably the best bet.
 
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