Help formatting a Seagate 400 Gig drive

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

dsr at tao.merseine.nu writes:

> 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.

So you want to convert from NTFS to Ext2/3?  You'll need to change
the filesystem type in the partition table first.  So, use:

  fdisk /dev/sda

and then follow the instructions to change the filesystem type from
HPFS/NTFS (7) to Linux (83).   Then you should be able to use mke2fs
to create the ext2/3 filesystem on the partition.

mke2fs wont work as-is because it's trying to "help you" not overwrite
data.

> -dsr-

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available