how to make an ext3 partiton on a USB disk?

[mcastel]

Hi all,

I just obtained a new iTek USB disk: it comes with an unique big partiton (230 Gb), formatted with NTFS filesystem. My kubuntu 7.10 correctly recognize the device, but has problems in mounting the filesystem (guess because of lack of NTFS support?)

I would like to resize the NTFS partition to make room for an ext3 filesytem, that could be mounted and used from my kubuntu box. Anyway, I run qtparted but it seems it is unable to resize NTFS partitions.. is it really so? Can I try workarounds for this job?

Thanks in advance,

Marco

[stealthbanana]

Re: how to make an ext3 partiton on a USB disk?

The easiest way would be using qtparted or gparted. Nice GUI frontents for parted. I did it with an external HD salvaged from an old laptop, split into 2 x 30GB partitions, one ntfs and one ext3, works fine.

As for ntfs support, install ntfs-3g, that should give full read write access.

[Qqmike]

Re: how to make an ext3 partiton on a USB disk?

Stick with GParted Live CD. It will do the partition editing for you. Easily.
If you do not already have a GParted CD, you'll find the two most recent versions are -10 and -11. get the -10 for now (it has a better "eject & reboot" menu option).

[joepk001]

Re: how to make an ext3 partiton on a USB disk?

I have a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB be drive. I installed
Kubuntu on one partition. However, it would end up with a
read-only file system. I believe I fixed this problem by finally
installing the Seagate software on a NTFS partion and running it from Windows XP.
The Seagate software allowed me to set the power saving mode to 'never' from
the default 15 minutes. I plan on petitioning Seagate for a Linux driver, so
it can still have a power saving option and Kunbuntu will know how to recognize a
sleeping drive and wake it up; to prevent getting 'read-only' and 'not writable'
errors.

Has this problem been seen by anyone else?

-Joe