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#1 2007-06-22 16:37:28

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

I connected an external 2 1/2 inch usb hard disc to my box ("bus powered") and it works fine
(with FAT file system). Is there a simple possibility to format this drive with EXT2 with the DNS323 box ? The reason is that i have no linux pc which i could use to format this drive.


DNS-323 FW1.03, 500GB-Samsung HD, 4-port USB-Hub, Clients: Vista Home Basic 64 bit, XP-Professional

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#2 2007-06-22 17:20:37

dkl
Member
From: Toulouse
Registered: 2007-06-16
Posts: 104

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

Simplest thing to do would be to boot from a Linux Live CD (Knoppix, Ubuntu... for ex.) on any other PC and format your drive there with GParted or equiv.

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#3 2007-06-23 11:43:35

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

dkl wrote:

Simplest thing to do would be to boot from a Linux Live CD (Knoppix, Ubuntu... for ex.) on any other PC and format your drive there with GParted or equiv.

OK, i was successfull with a Ubuntu 6.10 Live-CD using "GParted". However some more hints how to partition and format the drive would have been great. My first try was to create a primary partition and no extended partition on my 40 GB usb hard disc and i ran into the trouble that i got only a partition with a size of 8 GB because of addressing limitations.
My second try was to create an extended partition and within this a logical volume of size 40 GB and this worked. From my point of view it isn't self explaining how to format an external drive for the DNS-323 with ext2 for a
non partition, non linux guru smile
I thought maybe there is some service program on the DNS-323 like "mkfs.ext2" or a script which
could take over the task to format the usb disc like it was done for my primary SATA drive.


DNS-323 FW1.03, 500GB-Samsung HD, 4-port USB-Hub, Clients: Vista Home Basic 64 bit, XP-Professional

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#4 2007-06-23 11:49:16

DNS-323 Talker
Member
Registered: 2007-05-21
Posts: 245

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

Remember that attaching a drive to the USB port isn't an officially supported feature...just something that folks here have worked out, so I don't think we can't expect the DNS-323 to have a service program for that.


DNS-323 w/two Seagate 500 GB RAID1
Fonz's Fun_Plug- Don't DNS-323 without it!

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#5 2007-06-23 12:06:58

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

Ok, i agree on that, but it would have been possible that there is a kind of "generic" script / service / program
"prepare /dev/foo" which prepares the disc for usage. I found i.e. the fdisk program on the box which
gives some information on the external drive or e2fsck. So where is the partion and format stuff
which is used by the box to format the internal SATA drives ? Don't get me wrong, i'm perfectly happy with
my box now . smile


DNS-323 FW1.03, 500GB-Samsung HD, 4-port USB-Hub, Clients: Vista Home Basic 64 bit, XP-Professional

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#6 2007-06-23 14:10:46

frodo
Member
From: Stockholm, Sweden
Registered: 2007-01-17
Posts: 259

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

You can partition you disk in Windows. Then just use fdisk in linux to change partition type.

fdisk /dev/sdc (or what device is will be).
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4):
1 (assuming you only have one partition
Hex code (type L to list codes): 83
Command (m for help): w

And then you can just create a new fs on this partition.

mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdc1

Good luck!

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#7 2007-06-24 03:51:11

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

I like to give a short update: After i managed somehow to partition the drive as expected by the box i started a telnet session and there i started "mke2fs /dev/sdb5". And this did the job !
It formated the logical volume with ext2 file system.
Unfortunately "fdisk" on the DNS-323 seems to have some problems with the sizes of the drives, so that it seems to be impossible to use the fdisk from the box to partition the external drive.


DNS-323 FW1.03, 500GB-Samsung HD, 4-port USB-Hub, Clients: Vista Home Basic 64 bit, XP-Professional

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#8 2007-06-24 12:26:14

fonz
Member / Developer
From: Berlin
Registered: 2007-02-06
Posts: 1716
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

transstilben wrote:

Unfortunately "fdisk" on the DNS-323 seems to have some problems with the sizes of the drives, so that it seems to be impossible to use the fdisk from the box to partition the external drive.

Is it a problem of busybox1 fdisk in /usr/bin/fdisk? Have you tried fdisk from busybox 1.5.1 (my funplug) or 1.6.0 (fsck image)?

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#9 2007-06-24 15:55:13

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

fonz wrote:

Is it a problem of busybox1 fdisk in /usr/bin/fdisk? Have you tried fdisk from busybox 1.5.1 (my funplug) or 1.6.0 (fsck image)?

Ahh ! I just installed latest busybox/fun_plug.tar from fonz and now fdisk works like a charm.

It wasn't very clear to me that it makes sense to install this fun_plug-stuff because
i installed telnet and created my own fun_plug-file and everthing worked fine for
me (except fdisk). It wasn't clear that with the funplug.tar-file from fonz a new
version of fdisk is installed too. Sorry for this confusion.

The fun_plug.tar of fonz should be made a mandatory install to prevent people loosing their last hairs.
Well done , fonz !  smile

Last edited by transstilben (2007-06-24 17:07:02)


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#10 2007-06-25 02:50:06

transstilben
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-06-15
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Howto format an external hard disc with EXT2

I added a section in the howto-Wiki concerning usage of external usb disk drives and formating.
Maybe somebody feels that he would like to review and improve this ?  smile


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