Ubuntu :: Best File System For External Hard Drive?
Aug 22, 2010
I have a 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external setup with an ext4 file system. I'm going to purchase a 2.0TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external case, copy the data over and put my 1.5TB in a fire-resistant box in another house. I'm worried about a couple things however:
(1) I'm worried about the long-term viability of _any_ file system years into the future. I've been storing my data on hard drives (instead of CDs, DVDs or BDs) for years now due to their higher reliability than optical disks. However, the file system used in optical disks is UDF which I think has much longer viability into the future. I'm not going to store terabytes of data on optical discs of course, so I'm wondering what I should choose for a hard drive file system. FAT32 or NTFS (due to Windows' 90%+ presence on the desktop, including still being used by Windows 7) may be the best choice, but I much rather have a open source file system, especially one that allows for permissions, timestamps, etc.
(2) As for my 2TB hard drive that I will be using for a while into the future, should I continue to use ext4 (I've had no problem with it thus far), but is there another file system that has better performance when storing and transferring gigs of data?
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.
It started when I wanted to dual boot Windows 7 and Opensuse off of my netbook (No DVD/CD drive) I tried install suse from an external hard drive and I botched it. I ended up erasing EVERYTHING off of my internal netbook hard drive. Windows and all.
Well, I had a couple of other computers so I studied up and eventually successfully installed OpenSUSE 11.2 on my external hard drive (11.3 being the one that I accidentally erased everything with, so kinda scared of it) and now I want to install openSUSE 11.2 on my internal netbook hard drive.
I can not use disks
I can not use a flash drive (For some reason, even if I make it bootable, it will not load up, this could be because it's actually a 8GB microSD card that is placed in a USB card reader.)
I can not use an external hard drive because that's what I'm running suse off of.
I've tried reading up on how to install suse on another drive off of the hard drive and I've gotten as far as whenever I boot up the netbook with the suse external hard drive connected it will ask to boot into OpenSUSE, the Fail Safe, or to install OpenSuse. When I select to install it it gives me the Error 18 Unknown File system.
I've tried formatting the internal hard drive twice. One as NTFS and again as EXT4. Neither seems to effect it other than when it's ext4 I can open it and it contains a Lost and Found folder.
When I interrupt the boot sequence by pressing c and going to the terminal and I use the root (hd +TAB command it tells me I have a hd0 and a hd1. The hd1 only has 1 partition which is ext4, which I'm assuming hd1 is the internal hard drive (I'm not sure how to check) and the hd0 is the external hard drive, which has three partitions. One with an unknown file system and two with ext4. When I try to enter the set up from the terminal it gives me the same error for any thing I put it (e.g. root (hd0,0) gives the same error as root (hd0,1), or root (hd0,2) and root (hd1,0)
Something like it cannot locate these two files I'm assuming it needs to boot. If anyone finds this relevant I'll retry it and post the files its missing.
I've been searching for awhile and can't find any threads that can solve my problem. From other threads, however, I have noticed that I should probably include my menu.lst, listed below
Code:
I have also ran the boot info script and received the RESULTS.txt file it generates. Listed below
My external disk does not appear as mounted on the desktop (It's e-Sata and NTFS, samsung 1.36 Tera bytes ) There's nothing in /media, nor it appears on the desktop as mounted. What can i do to be able to use it?
My father installed Kubuntu to his external hard drive to try it out, however, it is running extremely slowly. It takes a good minute and a half to boot to the Plasma desktop and it even seems to run faster off of the LiveCD.His system easily meets the specifications to run Kubuntu (4 gigs of RAM, decent NVIDIA graphics card) yet it slows to a crawl immediately upon booting. Does anyone know how to fix this? The hard drive is a Western Digital MyBook, 475GB model.
I've installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on a External HDD (320GB Samsung S2). Worked like a charm. Bit slow to boot up and load programs, but after a while, works great. I installed it on the external HDD for one purpose: Work anywhere with Ubuntu, no matter which computer I use. I was thinking that was impossible, but I've tested thru several platforms (3 Notebooks, 2 netbooks, all Intel and one AMD Desktop). All worked flawlessly (32 Bits PAE activated and no matter how many cores are active, just works), BUT the themes.For no apparent reason, themes works on the computer I've installed Ubuntu on the HDD. It has his own Internal HDD with Windows 7 and two NTFS partitions.
Themes are stuck to the default boring-white from Gnome. I can only change the window controls. Compiz works, Wireless works, video works, sound works, filesystem works, system works - themes fail. Feels like I've hit my feet's little finger on a chair. P.S.: Ext. HDD is partitioned like this: 300GB FAT32 (it's my pop's HDD, he wants it this way), 18GB EXT4, 2GB Swap.
I have centos 5.3 installed. I plugged in a WD usb external HD, Icon is showing up on desktop everything is working formatted with ext3. I would like to have an entry for this in my /etc/fstab file, and I need to know how to enable Quotas on some files on it.
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
I have a laptop with only 30GB storage and I want to install Lubuntu in virtual box but Lubuntu needs 5GB of storage space which i dont have. Could i use an external 160GB hard drive to act as the hard drive for the virtual machine without affecting the files that are already on the external hard drive
What i really need to know is if there is a way to access a Ubuntu file system on a hard drive from a live CD. When i acess it now it just shows the Windows files on it, and i cant access the Ubuntu partition. What happened was this: I was trying to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive. I moved all the settings to the Hard drive so i didnt think it would affect my other drives. I mustve missed one of them because insteading of loading GRUB like it normally does, it came up with GRUB error 21 and did nothing. I tried to fix it, but nothing worked. I finally decided to unplug everything except the external and install it from there, so id atleast have a functioning desktop. As it turns out, my comp doesnt suport USB booting. So the only way i can use my computer is by Live CD. I was trying to fix things so i had both hard drives power supply unplugged. being slightly drowsy from staying up late that night, I plugged them in while my computer was on. the first one went in just fine, no problems. The second one though, also my master drive, i was having troubles pluging in. while i was turning it to fit in, it made a big spark and shocked my master drive. That drive had my MBR and Windows on it. Now It cant find a MBR, and i cant access the ubuntu partition on my slave drive. Is there any way to save this?? im 99.9% sure ive screwed myself over hardcore epically, but im hoping to save at least 1/2 my data.
when I load into Ubuntu 11.04 from my USB drive, why can't I access the files on my internal hard drive? I mount the drive but I cannot see any of the music, videos or documents contained on that drive (which is also an Ubuntu 11.04 drive). I was wondering so I could copy those files onto my external hard drive and reinstall since my Ubuntu crashed.
I installed ubuntu off of my laptop and put the Ubunto file system on a 1TB hard drive off of a drive enclosure. Now the only way I can access Windows is if the drive is still connected to the laptop. NO EXTERNAL HD No BOOT MENU when I boot up.
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code: sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
I've been installing/tweaking F12, and I've found something that I can't say I've ever seen or expected to find before: the contents of my ~/Documents folder has lost its permissions and ownership info. I restored it from a backup last night/this morning, and I've rebooted a few times since then. Other folders from the backup are OK, just Documents.I don't know what my options are. I could try to blow it away and restore it, but that doesn't answer what caused it. If there's a "relabel" or something, that might help... though I've never had to do it before. Could it be that after these two-and-some-change years, my hard drive is giving out? Good thing I have a recent backup... but it'd be a shame to lose all my work getting F12 to work again.
What file system should I use to partition a slow and old hard drive? I know that ext2 was best for old computers which mine is not but I am using an old hard drive for extra storage and I was curious if anyone knew if using ext2 or ext4 would show any performance differences.
I had a drive that kept kernel panic'ing so my data center recommended using the spare hard drive to reinstall OS on, and import the data from the old drive. (they checked the hardware, it wasn't the hardware) The new install is done, and I need to mount the old drive and get backups off it since my data center does not provide management whatsoever.
It's the same OS on both (Cent OS 5.4 32-bit) I'm an advanced user on windows, but linux gets me. I can ssh in, do basic stuff like setup IP ranges and restart services. I normally navigate the box through SFTP so I have a gui. WHM shows me my drives as such
Found Disk: hda Found Disk: sdb
so I'm assuming SDB is my old drive and the drive I need to access. I attempted to follow instructions on
I have a Toshiba laptop that seems to be freezing on extended operations involving the file system/hard drive. (that's kind of a guess on my part). The system has frozen during the last day or two when I:
- try a large file operation with Nautilus - try exporting a large video file from Kdenlive - try formatting the disk for a new install of Maverick (I decided that with the new version almost out, I might try upgrading in case I broke my system)
What I see is the screen freezing and the mouse does not move. As I said, I tried installing the Maverick RC from the Alternate CD (I wanted to do a minimal install). The install hung on the partitioning step and the caps-lock key started blinking (though I don't get this in other cases). I have booted into my Lucid live-cd and a Puppy live-cd to try Gparted, with the same results - the system freezes (but the caps-lock key doesn't blink). Puppy HAS performed better generally, for example I was able to complete my large file operation (backing things up!) but it is freezing on the partitioning step.
Having problems with external hard drives. I may be wrong, but I suspect they originated with an upgrade to 10.04 last Christmas. Around that time I also started using Amazon's S3 storage system, and, as a consequence, I stopped using my WD 80G external drive, previously used to backup my important files.
A week or so ago I decided to start using the WD drive again. I can't remember exactly what I did, but it wasn't happy - never caused any problems before. When I plug it in, the on-off light as the front keeps flashing on and off, and when I try to remove the drive I get the message: Error unmounting volumne An error occured while performing an operation on "My Book" (Partition 1 of WD 800BB External): The device is busy
Details: Cannot unmount because file system on device is busy Assuming the device had died - it's about 5 years old - I bought a 160G Samsung S-Series drive - my but they do look neat! Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have solved my problem. I plugged the new drive in, and it happily appeared on my desktop. It seemed a good idea at the time, but I then started to format the drive - using the default option of FAT. All went well at first, but then the format process stopped.
My new Samsung drive now seems to be operating pretty much as the WD device, I can't copy to the drive, and attempts to unmount it generate a response similar to what's happening with the WD drive. Currently, although plugged in, I can't see the drive on my desktop, although it appears under Places. However, when I try to mount the drive, I get the message: Unable to mount SAMSUNG A job is pending on /dev/sdb1
I would like to install Linux Ubuntu 11.04 on an external hard drive - its partitioned and ready for Linux.I've downloaded and burnt the .iso file to a DVD so its all good so far...First of all... is this possible without messing up my macbook? I don't particularly want to break into my macbook to disconnect the hard drive (I read on a tutorial for a previous version of Ubuntu that I'd have to do that... - does it still apply to 11.04?) - as it voids the warranty (I checked ).The reason I ask this is because I had a friend who partitioned their internal hard drive and installed Ubuntu on it. But after installation was complete they couldn't boot up Windows 7 or Ubuntu... and it resulted in them having to clean install Windows 7... - I don't want to end up in that situation
Second... If it is possible to install it without messing up my macbook... - Do I just follow the install instructions but just make sure that where possible I make sure that everything is installed on my external hard drive?...I really need someone to put my mind at rest that everything will run smoothly and that I'll be able to run Mac OS X as usual but also that I'll be able to boot from my external hard drive to run Ubuntu.
I have 350GB external Western Digital USB hard Drive.When I try to remove it from the system by executing Safely Remove Drive menu the fedora 15 system gets stuck.The processor starts giving a hum sound and it goes on even if it is left for half an hour in the stuck state.The Mouse is not working and everything is halted.
i have installed fedora 14 with so many libraries ,development tools installed on my pc but i usually have to present some projects which can run on my system .........and can't be executed or compiled due to absence of libraries and tools there so, i there some way to so that i can use this current installation on my hard drive of my pc to some external media like external hard disk and plug and use that installation anywhere on any system..
So I recently got a WD MyPassport external hdd with 500gb capacity. I formatted it to NTFS so that it would be more efficient transferring data between my Ubuntu and Win7 dual boot. But now I want know if it is possible for me to create a 100gb FAT32 partition on the external without destroying the data on it.
My Toshiba 500Gb USB hard drive is not being detected anymore when i insert it in 9.10. It only started doing this from last week, it was fine before (and it works fine in Windows XP). The connections are fine and all, because when i type "lsusb", i see it as follows:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 19d2:0063 ONDA Communication S.p.A. Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0930:0b09 Toshiba Corp.
Is it possible to use Ubuntu for a malfunctioned external hard drive?A year ago my external hard drive malfunctioned and I cant get into it, though it plugs in alright and the computer recognizes it, I'm hoping that maybe precious files havent been wiped and are just stuck in there.Is there anyway that Ubuntu can help?Also, if there is, what exactly is the first thing I do or type into the terminal?
I'm trying to get ubuntu 9.04 to recognize a Maxtor One Touch III USB external hard drive. This drive has been formatted and used on a Windows XP. I cleared everything off but am trying to see if I can arrange it so that I can back up from linux and access (if need be) from a Windows machine.
Here is what I get with fdisk -l:
/dev/sda1 * 1 14219 114214086 83 Linux /dev/sda2 14220 14593 3004155 5 Extended /dev/sda5 14220 14593 3004123+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I am having problems mounting an iso on my external hard drive. I do not want to move it onto my linux partition because it is 3.6 GB. I have a directory made (/media/iso) that I would like to mount it in, but if that doesn't work then I don't care where it goes. After I mount it I want to be able to run it using Wine, but that will come later. For now I just need to get it mounted. And, of course, I am fairly new to linux/ubuntu.
