Firewire/USB Disk Preparation


All operations must be done as root.  Either log in as root, or su - ,
to get the correct environment. Note the - sign.  It is important.

Find the drive, so that the partitioning is done on the right drive.  An
easy way to do this is to issue the following command after connecting
the drive:

cat /proc/partitions

The new drive will show up as a pair of lines (usually).  The output
from a system with a SATA drive is shown below (the Penguin systems).

major minor  #blocks  name

   8     0  293036184 sda
   8     1     104391 sda1
   8     2    8385930 sda2
   8     3   16779892 sda3
   8     4          1 sda4
   8     5    8385898 sda5
   8     6    8385898 sda6
   8     7    8385898 sda7
   8     8    4192933 sda8
   8     9    4192933 sda9
   8    10  234219636 sda10
   8    16  245116416 sdb
   8    17  245111706 sdb1

The new drive is sdb.  On the older dell systems, the system is on a set
of hd? drives, and the firewire/usb drives will show up as sda.

Unmount the disk first, if mounted.

umount /dev/sdb1

Now create the new partition table. Use the fdisk command for this.

fdisk /dev/sdb  (open the whole device, not the first partition)

Option o (create a new partition table)
Option n (create a new partition)
        p (for primary)
        1 (for partition 1)
Option l (list, make sure it is there)
Option w ( to write the partition table out)

Then it is time to do the file system.

mke2fs -j -m0 -LUGADATA3 /dev/sdb1

The switches mean:
	-j Make an journalled filesystem, ie ext3
	-m0 Make all the space available to users, reserve 0% for root
	-LUGADATA3  Set the volume label to UGADATA3.  Volume labels are
limited to about 11 characters
	/dev/sdb1 is the partition to create the filesystem on.

This should go fairly fast, with a 250GB drive done in less than 5
minutes if there is no problems with rewrites, etc.