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Re: [Sheflug] How To
And Lo! The Great Prophet Alec Melling uttered these words of wisdom:
>
> The crux of my long winded question is: How can I gain access to this drive
> and re-format it in Kubuntu?
>
Obvious question: why is it read-only access? Is this Linux forcing
read-only access? If so, what have you tried to use to write to it?
The normal way I'd gain access is:
- Log on as root or su to root
- Determine physical device (/dev/hd<x> or /dev/sd<x>)
- Start fdisk
- Repartition
- Save
- Reboot (not always needed)
I'm hazarding that you only appear to have read-only access as the drive is
NTFS. Linux does not (really) support writing to NTFS[1], so most
distributions will mount NTFS read-only only. Hence trying to create a file
on an NTFS partition will fail.
Now if you don't care for the data on the drive, you should be able to
start fdisk on the drive without any problem, delete the existing
partitions (with the 'd' command) and create a new primary partition that
takes up the entire disk with the 'n' command.
> A supplementary question is that given that this drive will be Linux only fro
> m
> now on, what would be the best file system to format it in?
ReiserFS is my FS of choice these days. ext3 is also good, but I only use
ext3 when upgrading existing ext2 partitions as ext2 can be converted to
ext3 non-destructively. Any brand new clean partition gets Reiser though.
Chris...
[1] It used to be marked as 'DANGEROUS' in the kernel config tools; now
it's marked as 'partially working' in that it can only overwrite existing
files. Generally still unsafe.
--
\ Chris Johnson \ NP: 03. Prokofiev - Peter And The Wolf -
\ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk \ The Wolf
\ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/ \
\ http://redclaw.org.uk/ ~---------------------------------------
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