External USB drives

[mchassy]

Hello,

I have a LaCie external 500 gig USB drive. I saw on a LinuxQuestions.org, that you can't partition/format this kind of disk from linux. Is this true, or does someone know how to do this. Also, on the LaCie site (where there is no mention of linux by the way), they say that if you format the disk in fat32, then you can't create a partion of more than 32 gigs, though they say this is a window limitation and not a limitation of the disk or the fat32 format. Does anyone know anything about that?

Thanks for any info.

Mark

[askrieger]

Re: External USB drives

I don't know about LaCie, but my Western Digital 160GB usb drive came formatted Fat32 out of the box, (and it was designed to run with Windows). If it had not, I would have formatted it with Partition Magic under windows (one of the reasons I keep a windows dual boot around) if, and only if, I couldn't format it with parted. If I recall correctly, I did have to format my older 90 GB usb disk and that worked fine in Linux. My only concern, in your case, would be the amount of time it would take to format a 500 GB disk.

Also, I know that there is a limit on the size of VFAT partitions, although offhand I don't remember what it is. But If you make 3 160 GB partitions, I see know reason that it wouldn't work as well as my one 160 GB partition.

[mchassy]

Re: External USB drives

Thanks for the info.
For the moment, my PC with a windows boot is busted 
So I brought my disk into work and formatted it in NTFS for the moment.
As to the limit for fat32 partitions, La cie says the limit is 32 gigs, which seems somewhat ridiculous.
Once I have my windows box up and running again, I'll take a look.
In the meantime, I think I will test some of the NTFS for linux tools.

Mark

[mchassy]

Re: External USB drives

Hello,

My windows box is up and running again (more or less ;-)

I installed partition magic 8 on my PC, but I was unable to reformat my USB hard drive to fat32.

One thing I noticed is that even though I had reformatted the external drive in NTFS, it showed up as BAD (and I'm guessing that means what it says) in partition magic.

They only choice partition magic gave me was to reformat as NTFS, but that failed in any case. I'm fairly sure that my install of partition magic is correct cause I managed to reformat my internal drive correctly.

Any ideas?

Mark