Re: [Sheflug] external hard drive.

[Joe <n3hima@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jan White wrote:
> Marc Kelly said the following on 26/02/2009 12:01:
>> robert fallis wrote:
>>> I've just had a major crash, reinstalled now,but lost a lot of data.
>>> I'm thinking of putting my Data on to an external hard dive, in the hope
>>> that it will not be lost, Will this work? and is thier anything I should
>>> be aware of in doing?
>>
>> My only point is be aware some of the smaller 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 inch ones
>> claim to power from the USB.. by using a Y splitting USB cable for extra
>> current, I have seen those do weird things under heavy use.
>>
>> I back up to one and on some systems the USB won't provide the juice all
>> the time under heavy load. Caused it to vanish from USB bus, and
>> reappear moments later. Use external power, all is fine.
>>
>>
>>
> Ditto on the USB power problems, especially with laptops,
> desktops are generally ok.  The cute little 8x10 cm, 150gram
> ones are only USB powered.  If you're backing up a desktop
> machine and don't need the disk to be very portable get the
> big ones using external power.  (Not as green, of course.)
> 
> BEWARE - it's no longer true that they come with FAT32 format
> and will thus plug&play in Linux.  Many of the new ones,
> especially if they have 'automatic backup' or some such feature,
> are now coming NTFS formatted and may not be recognized.
> I had one that I had to do a 2 stage reformat on.
> The really annoying thing is that the web sites selling
> them virtually never say anything about the formatting.
> 
> To use properly for full backup in Linux you should reformat
> to ext3, but for storage of data that you might want to
> share with Windows (eg. if you have dual boot) FAT32 is best.
> 
> Cheers,  Jan
Surely it would be recognised by the system, even if it wasn't able to
be mounted (most distros have ntfs-3g support in them now anyway). Just
fire up parted (or gparted if your a GUI junkie) as root and reformat
from there. If parted won't recognise the partition table for some
reason, just create a new one (mklabel msdos) -- you'll only erase what
data was on the device when you bought it.

Joe

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