General :: Formatting Western Digital External Drive To EXT3?
Sep 15, 2010
I am wondering if any of you technical guys would be willing to format my Western Digital external USB 1.5 TB Hard Drive to Linux EXT3. I am naturally happy to pay for your time and trouble and for postage. The WD drive is for storing video footage and will be connected to my Humax Freesat HD Digital TV Box(not a computer), and the Humax Box will only record high deffination programmes in EXT3 format. I've tried to do the job myself with my PC, but have failed to change my system to format in Linux.
I bought a Western Digital 1TB external hard drive to use with a Gentoo build. It connected beautifully, mounted visibly but despite being mounted read/write any attempt to write to it produced the error "read-only file system". I chased a number of red herrings before I found that the drive comes with an NTFS filesystem and NTFS support in my kernel was set to read-only, which I think was a default setting. Simple fix was to install a different file system - as it was a new drive there was no old data to lose.
I'm trying to format a 500 GB external drive with gparted in ubuntu 10.10 (I searched & didn't see this issue in the forum). I set up and formatted two partitions, one for fat32, and the other with ext3, which appears to format ok, but I can't use it. Both partitions show up and appear to mount, but the ext3 partition won't accept activity (make new folder, copy in files), while the fat32 partition works fine. Both partitions show up ok when I query in terminal "sudo fdisk -l"
I have a 2TB Western Digital USB drive. This has been previously connected to a Windows box without problem. I have connected it to my Linux slackware distro computer. It mounts OK, but is only mounted read-only. Kernel version is Linux 2.6.21.5-smp.
fdisk -l gives:
Disk /dev/sda: 1999.6 GB, 1999696297984 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243115 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
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Why can't I mount this things read-write? I can read and write just fine to this device mounted on windows. I can even read/write to this Windows mounted drive from linux when I mount it using mount.cifs Also, mounting a USB flash drive as: mount /dev/sdb1 /mydir, works fine. I can read/write to /mydir.
I have Fedora 11 running on my server and I am trying to use an external WD 160mb usb fat32 drive. When the drive first fires up I am able to see the root file system, but then it fails. Thanks Rondo
I am using Ubunto 10-04 LTS and trying to connect to Western Digital (World Book) network drive. By signing into Mionet I am able to reach this drive on my network and remotely. Trying to run the executable resulted in the following error:
"The file '/media/Disc 1 290909/WDAnywhereAccess_3_6_0.exe' is not marked as executable. If this was downloaded or copied form an untrusted source, it may be dangerous to run. For more details, read about the executable bit."
I have a Western Digital My Book World Edition external harddisk with blue rings. I filled it up and now want to delete the data and start over. I'm set in my ways and have been accustom to reformatting harddisks periodically (sector maintainance, etc.) It's worked for me as I've luckily have not had a disk crash in 25 years.My webapp is not helping me with the reformat and neither is Western Digital tech support. I've heard that it was factory formatted with something called Linux ext3. Does this make sense? Has anyone had any experience with reformatting external harddisks being used as a NAS (home use).
I'm actually not a Linux newbie, but I'm DEFINITELY no expert either... I'm trying to copy all my data(approx 50 GB) from a usb drive(western digital 250GB) with ntfs partition in one go... The problem is that it only fails for big transfers... works fine for smaller transfers like 1Gigs or less... I have just one internal hdd partitioned into two ext3 partitions.. so I have sda1(Primary.. mount pt /), sda2(swap) and sda3(mount pt /piyush)... The usb drive comes up as sdb(sdb1).. just has one ntfs partition... I've also installed the ntf-3g drivers.... but doesn't seem to work... I've also noticed that when the machine hangs and I try to shut down, it fails and I get a message again again... (sdb1- no sense detected) or something like this... don't remember the exact message... will post the exact one if no one is able to figure out what's wrong...
I set my mom up with Linux mint 9, and I am wondering how to add a 250G hard drive to it.(On slackware it was easy on ubuntu and Linux mint its is very difficult, because of the addresses.) Is there some easy way to add it to format/check for bad blocks. One more thing I don't want to deal with addresses so is there some easy way to do that?
is there a way of sharing an ext3/ext4 formatted partition on an external USB drive between different users (uids) on different Linux machines without creating a group for this purpose, setting the group ownership of the partition to this group and adding each respective user to the group on every machine?This would mean that I need to have root privileges on every machine... which I may not have in some cases.I'm using the partition to store the code I'm developing on Linux and I would like the option to be safe... if possible.I could use a vfat partition but then I have no control of the rw rights + I cannot develop directly in the dir: I would always have to tar.gz the directory, extract, work, tar.gz, copy to the external drive.
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (3907027119): Invalid argument HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,
or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...), or a wrong device is tried to be mounted, or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS), or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid). Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
Alright I am about to throw this western digital device out the door and drive over it. The back story is that I have done a Debian net install on an older tower PC laying around the office. I am going to use this tower as an FTP server to store and backup several other servers we have have. We also have an older Western Digital (WD) my book 1110 sitting here. I was planning on using the external storage as the repository as it is 1TB raided. Seems like a good plan, plug the device into the tower and instantly two new drives show up "External CD-ROM" drive: "WD Smartware" and then "My Book". When I click on the cd rom drive I get the .pdfs and executables that are stored on the device. However when I click on the "My Book" drive I get the message "Invalid mount option when attempting to mount the volume 'My Book'.".
user@debian:~# mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom #To check what is mounted user@debian:~# mount /dev/sda5 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro) tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
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The question is how do I get the system of WD to load onto Debian 2.6.26-2-686? I am guessing either the version of Debian Lenny I have is too old to be compatible?
Want to format and partition the external hard drive for USB storage for DD WRT (i.e. into ext3)The drive is MS-DOS (FAT32) - Using Disk Utility (MAC) i erased what was on the drive.It mounts properly and can be accessed on the Mac OS.Upon plugging the USB into the Mac, the drive does not show on the Ubuntu desktop.Under the USB icon (bottom right) it indicates no USB devices attached however the "Western Digital My Book [0175]" is greyed out.
Going "Places" > "Computer" Only "File System" visible. GParted - Drive not visible (only /dev/sda) Using the sudo fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 3221 MB, 3221225472 bytes[code]...
My Western Digital My Book World Edition II enclosure failed recently and as normal, WD support sucks. A friend told me he salvaged his by looking at the individual disks with Linux. How can I recover the disks, which seem to be fine.I can put them into an enclosure that supports JBOD and Raid 1 and it will see the drives when hooked up to a Windows XP system. It does not see anything on the drives but it knows they are there. I have a copy of some data recovery software Easus Data Recovery Wizard and it finds loads of data on the drives but recovery, according to the timer, will take weeks.How can I make Ubuntu see each drive and mount it?
I have a 250GB external hard drive that I want to format to ext4. It will be used to store back ups of my documents, music and pictures. I tried booting the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD (amd64) and using gparted to delete the partitions that where on the hard drive leaving only unallocated space, then creating one new partition that was ext4. I clicked apply and after a short time it said all operations completed successfully.
Now the problem is it won't let me transfer any documents onto the hard drive, or even create a folder or file. If I go into the properties of the hard drive, under the permissions tab it says I am not the owner...?
What I've done is partition my external hard drive to have 130g for my Windows info. Then putting the 90g towards Linux. I used a live cd on my home computer to format the 90g of Linux. I'm simply wanting something to learn more about from time to time that I can use on my home computer, laptop, fiance's computer, etc. So the formatting went successful. I have linux on the 90g of hard drive that I wanted it on. The problem is this. When I take the live cd out, when I remove my external hard drive from my computer. The home computer (which has Windows) won't boot. It comes up with a error 21. But now when I boot with the external hard drive I use, I make it to the boot menu and can boot from Windows.I need to be able to boot from Windows on this home computer, since my mother and grandparents use this computer quite a bit. I'm not always going to have my ext. hard drive plugged into this computer, so I need some help if you all know now.
I have this 1.5 terabyte external hard drive. It has some bad sectors and although I keep reading that you can't really do much about them, I'm going to reformat the hard drive. I was just wondering what utility would be best, or because it's NTFS and I need it to be NTFS afterwards, should I just do this on Windows?
How can I format a USB hard drive to ext3/ext4 or whatever file format and have full permission to read, write and execute all files afterwards? When using the command line (as ROOT of course) mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb? Restricts the rights to ROOT as does the procedure gParted. The man mkfs did not help much. Configuring the fstab- file is a bit of a hassle, so it would be nice, if there was an option to set the permissions "correctly" right from the beginning. Setting Ubuntu (I'm using Ubuntu 9.10) up, so that it mounts USB devices not as ROOT as default but giving all users all permissions seems to be really complicated, as a guy from my local LUG told me.
I have just purchased a 2TB drive for my server and I was trying to get an idea of the differences between these file systems or other file systems out there. What is the amount of space after formatting for ext4, ext3, and ntfs?
I'm trying to partition/format a new external hard disk for backup and have run into a snag that now prevents my computer from booting. In the description below of what happened please bear with me as I do my best to remember the commands and screen output (which for obvious reasons I don't have in front of me).As root.The disk was subsequently writable. However, I then realized that the default start and end cylinders had resulted in a very small partition apparently occupying some free cyclinders in the beginning of the disk.
So next I ran fdisk again, deleting the sdc4 I had just created and creating a new one instead, this time using the cylinders at the end of the disk. When I exited fdisk I got a message something like that the new tables can only be read upon a subsequent reboot. I ran mkfs again, but not e2label. Indeed using /sbin/fdisk -l, sdc4 still had the small size as defined initially. So I rebooted.
Now when it comes up I get something like "checking filesystems. fchk.ext3: can't resolve 'LABEL=/media/LaCie2TB1'" and am prompted to login as root to correct. I tried to simply delete sdc4 again but that didn't help. I also tried to edit /etc/fstab (using vi, which I don't know at all) but it kept telling me that this is a read only file, even though permissions are rw for root.Can anyone out there help me so that (1) I can boot into my computer, and (2) I can correctly partition and format the hard drive??
i needed to change my external hard drive's file system from ext3 to fat32, to use it in windows, which i did the simple way: i shrunk the ext3 partition, made a fat32 partition, copied the files over, removed the ext3 and made the fat32 bigger. unfortunately, while gparted was making the partition larger, my computer shut down. i lost all my files and the partition messed up immediately. i made a new fat32 partition, after deleting the old one, but noticed that gparted was showing 100 gigs already in use (???). so now i have a 300 gb hard drive with only 200 gb i can use; i ran df to make sure gparted wasn't messing up, but indeed it shows the partition as being only 200 gigs in size. i haven't tried making any other kind of partition yet, such as ext3, for fear of losing my files again, and because it wouldn't be permanent anyway, because i need those files in windows and stupid microsoft won't make their OS ext3 compatible.
I switched over from Windows to Linux. I have an external drive that has basically just media files on it. Are there any advantages to converting this to ext3, or should I just leave it as ntfs3?
I have an external drive which is formatted for Linux (ext3) and want to re-format it to use it under windows. I have no data on the disk that I need, just want to re-format so I can use it for a backup for my windows7 laptop.
I have only known about Linux software for the past couple of weeks. I want to install Ubuntu 10.10 on an older desktop I have so I can become more familiar with it. I am average in knowladge about Windows OS and MS-DOS. I tried to install Ubuntu and I get an error message about the harddrive. The CD I am booting with will load on my other PC with Windows XP on it. I have only let it run on it long enough to verify that it is bootable.
I have made a floppy boot disc following the instructions on another Linux site about Ubuntu. I have also tried to boot my alternate PC with the floppy and it boots up. The harddrive on my working PC is a Maxtor 40gb formatted with NTFS file system. The harddrive in the older desktop is a Western Digital 80GB WD800LB-55DNA0.It worked fine with Windows XP on it. I also made a Western Digital DATA Lifeguard for DOS floppy and it boots with it.
