Help formatting a Seagate 400 Gig drive

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 04:04:32PM -0400, Stephen Goldman wrote:
> Hello Blu,
>         I wish to format a external Seagate drive that currently has a NTFS filesystem on it.
> 
>         The device is connected the system as \dev\sda1- via usb cable
> 
>         I ran the "mke2fs -j /dev/sda1" - I thought it would format the drive with e2fs - but it did not-
> 
>         I 'm puzzled- fdisk - gives no option to format anything but partitions using RHE4.

fdisk creates partitions on a disk; mkfs creates a filesystem on
a partition.

So:

fdisk /dev/sda
(now delete partitions, create them, whatever.)

mke2fs /dev/sda1 
(will create a filesystem on the first partition of sda)

Is that more straightforward? If not, send us error messages.

-dsr-