Ubuntu Installation :: How To Format USB Disk With Ext3
May 13, 2010
I want to format an USB disk with ext3. If I do this with gparted, it will be formatted, but I cannot write to it. Reading is no problen, at least it shows the lost+found folder. I guess its a problem with access rights. It would be sufficient if user "papa" would have access on one ubuntu karmic machine. But I cannot solve this graphically. The purpose of the operation is to be able to copy my /home directory onto the USB disk as a backup, before I upgrade to the current version of Ubuntu. FAT32 is no option as some files are too long.
I have a 160Gig and a 40 Gig drive.I would like to install the system on the 160 Gig, and use the 40 Gig drive as a storage for backups or whatever.It appears in the installation process that I am required to use a mount point, which would then turn the drive over to the root system, which would not allow it to be totally available to me.I just want to format it to ext3 filing system.Coffeecat, if you are out there and see this, strange things are happening to the 40 Gig drive - it says it is using 2 gig, but it is totally empty of all system files, hidden files, trash, etc. and it is being imaged in the media folder in root. I believe I have messed this install up to the point of no return and think I should go ahead and start over.
I'm fairly new to Ubuntu and I'm running Karmic Koala. I just reformatted an NTFS partition to Ext3, as I no longer need to access is from my windows installation. Now I'm unable to mount it though, and I get the message: Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with: mount: only root can mount /dev/sda6 on /media/DATA2 (DATA2 being the name of the previous NTFS partition. Now the label is linuxdata)
When I try to mount it using sudo in terminal I get the following message if I use the label DATA2:
NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount '/dev/sda6': Ogiltigt argument The device '/dev/sda6' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
And if I use the label linuxdata: mount: can't find /media/linuxdata in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab I've tried to search for help, but been unable to find an explanation.
I have a 2 TB disk in an external SATA dock, formatted with a single ext3 (Linux) partition, which doesn't show up in the Windows 7 Computer Management->Disk Management utility, even as a raw/blank disk. I've verified that there's nothing wrong with the disk by connecting it to my Linux machine and mounting it, and I've verified that the dock is functioning properly by connecting a different FAT32-formatted disk, which mounts flawlessly as expected.I realize that I can't actually read the ext3 partition without additional software (e.g., Ext3IFS), but why doesn't the disk show up at all? Is there some sort of stupid anti-Linux filter built in? Is there any way to force Windows to recognize the disk, so that I can at the very least use direct block access with it?
Background: I want to clone an identical 2 TB disk onto this one. Due to my hardware layout, it's much easier to have the source disk attached to one machine and the destination disk connected to another, and do the clone over the network (the network is not a bottleneck with switched gigabit ethernet), than it is to hook them both up to one machine.(1) I did this once before when both machines were running Linux, but I've since upgraded the destination machine and decided to switch back to Windows for regular desktop use. I've got Cygwin installed, and have verified that the same basic method (dd + nc) will work, but I can't do anything if Windows doesn't even consider the destination disk to exist.I only have one eSATA port on each machine. Opening them up just to do this clone is a rather large annoyance. Also, since this is my backup disk, I'd like to eventually automate the cloning from the active disk to another one that I regularly swap with a third disk that I store off-site.
OS: Debian unstable 32bit, kernel 2.6.32-2, grub 1.98 from late january 2010 (only have working net-access from work now, so I am grabbing information from memory). EXT3 and EXT4 support is compiled into the kernel along with chipset/scsi/sata support (not as modules), and I have tested to boot ext3 with it before proceeding. Prereq: my old disk started to have too much S.M.A.R.T errors, so I bought another one, put in a USB cabinet, added swap and ext4 partition/filesystem to it, and copied over all data from the old system to the new that was mounted at /dest using the command "find ./ -xdev -print0 | cpio -paV0 /dest". Swiched disks, so I now have the ext4 disk sitting at /dev/sda (partitions: sda1 => ext4, sda2 => swap), and booted into rescue-mode from cdrom, using /dev/sda1 as root with a shell on. After doing this, I performed the following commands:
mount --bind /dev /dest/dev chroot /dest
modified the /etc/default/grub to instruct the kernel to boot using ext4, ran grub-install --recheck /dev/sda ran update-grub to modify /boot/grub/grub.cfg (which looks as it should) After doing this, grub finds my partition and mounts it. It however stalls with the message: "warning: unable to open an initial console" and does nothing after this point. I have no ramdisk, but my old kernel booted fine from ext3 (and still does if I copy it to a ext3 partition), and since the ext4 support is compiled into the kernel - should I really need a ramdisk?
This is my situation, I had installed Ubuntu in my whole drive in 640Gig. Now, I want to partition it, without affecting my Ubuntu operating system. I just want 320Gig for my Ubuntu and 320 for my Windows.
I know how partition using Windows but from Linux, that I don't know.
I was running ubuntu as a live cd and I wanted to format my pen drive into an ext3 filesystem. I put in sudo mkfs /dev/sda1, but know im thinking that sda1 was my HDD!! I removed the cd from my computer, and it wont boot up into windows anymore!The only thing that is giving me hope is that the mkfs took about 1 min to format whatever it was formatting (my pen drive or my hdd!!) and my hdd is 500gb big. Is there anyway that I could have accidentaly formatted my HDD?
Today I add hard disk and tried to make partion tion as extended. but i could not format it as ext3. and I could not also access the drive using fidsk /dev/sdb1. It rerurns error as: /dev/sdb1 unable to read .
I have a lv image = /dev/vg0/server01. I create a partition using fdisk /dev/vg0/server01. Now, i have a partition under lv image = /dev/vg0/server01p1. how do i format /dev/vg0/server01p1 to ext3, it seems that the system doesn't recognize the partition under /dev. the purpose of this is to fully restore filesystem on domU (xen).
how to reformat my Bufalo USB drive to EXT3 format so that I can use it as a secondary drive for my Humax PVR. I am a new user to both Linux Ubunto and Gparted I have downloaded Gparted and connected the external drive to my laptop which is running Ubunto and can see the external drive I have never partitioned or formatted a drive before.
I recently installed Linux to run a few Linux based tools on a disk images I have, and I can't seem to copy the disk image over to my ext3 partition.
The particular distibution I'm using is BackTrack 4 r2, which is Ubuntu based. I can't seem to find specifically which version of Ubuntu is being used. The disk image is 108GB. It is currently located on a NTFS partition on a SATA hard drive connected directly to the computer. The ext3 partition is located on a second SATA hard drive connected to the same computer. It has 200GB total. I do not remember exactly how much free space it had but "df -h" showed a lot more than 108GB. The computer has 4GB of RAM and I gave it 8GB of swap space.
At this point it has been running for more than 12 hours. This is far longer than I would expect it to take had I been copying the file under Windows. How ever I do not have much experience with Linux, so if it's supose to take this long please let me know. I am planning on letting it run until I wake up tomorrow.
"cp -v" hasn't been very verbose at all. The only sign I have that indicates the computer is still trying to do something is the HDD light on my chasis that has stayed lit this whole time.
I have a NAS from WD that runs some stripped down flavor of linux. The NAS has one USB port at the back which can be used to expand the storage. If I plug in an external disk formated in either NTFS or HFS+ then the system automatically mounts the disk and shares it over samba. If I plug in a disk that is formated in ext3, the disk is recognized but that's about it. It doesn't mount or get shared or anything. I have tried asking WD about this and I have tried asking google. But after two days of searching I am turning here for some more expert advice.
Here is what I've managed to figure out so far.
If I check dmesg before and after plugging in the ext3 usb disk I have found out that these lines are added to the log:
Code:
I have tried googleing those last two lines but I haven't found any info that I can make any sense of.
If I run the command "mount -a" I get the following messages from the shell: "mount: Cannot read /etc/fstab: No such file or directory"
Hover I am able to mount the ext3 disk manually. First I get this info from fdisk
Code:
And then I run these two commands:
Code:
This makes the usb disk visible in the shell, but since this is a NAS, it is kinda useless as long as it doesn't show up in samba.
Since I'm pretty new to linux I don't know what to try next so I'm hoping for some advice as to what I can do to make the ext3 usb disk automount.
I am student of MCS and working on final project. I am the user of windows xp. I am new in Linux. I am working on a project that titles "Hard disk data Recovery of ext2 and ext3 in linux". In windows, including dos.h and bios.h header files in program of c language I can send interrupt to bios and access most of the devices like parallel port, hard disks etc. But problem is that there is no bios.h and dos.h files in gcc. Now how can I access my hard drive using c program. How can I call int13h interrupt in linux or there is any other function in the linux to access the hard disk. In fact I want to access sectors of my hard disk using c language program. How can I do it?
I need to copy data from a single HD, which used to be part of a Linux RAID 1. I've googled around, but can't find any clue how to mount partitions from this single HD.
Background: The HD comes from a linux based NAS box Synology DS207+. The NAS uses ext3 as filesystem. Both NAS disks are fine, but the other NAS hardware is dead and not worth repairing or replacing.
I have been having problems with filesystem corruption on my eeepc 1000H for a long time now. I have tried using different filesystems, kernels and distributions (arch, slackware) to no effect. I am starting to grow suspicious that this problem lies somewhere else, as I haven't seen anyone else having similar problems in such a variety of scenarios.
I have tried testing my ram using memtest86+, didn't come up with anything after a full run through. I also have tried using e2fsck -c to check for bad blocks, it finds none. I had a go at using smartctl but wasn't really sure what I was doing. I did a long test and it came up with nothing anyway.
This problem is in addition to the problems I've been having with my intel graphics chip and KMS. A lot of the time there are lockups when booting into X, which can only be gotten out of by a hard reset. This is sometimes what causes the original filesystem errors. I've stopped messing around with KMS for now to eliminate this but my current system in unbootable. I'm guessing my disk is wrecked but have as yet seen no definitive proof. Can anyone recommend anything that I should do?
I am currently on ext4 with a custom kernel 2.6.33-rc6 (the stock kernel shipping with slackware does not have the elantech extension for psmouse included). When I was using arch, I was just using the stock kernels.
The program damage my external hard disk brand Western Digital of 1 TB and 3 partition of that disk. I'm deeply sad and hopeless... googling a little bit I found that this is and old problem, was my first try. I have a lot, of very important information, I don't even know if is this the right group on this forum to put my question.
I got a 40GB seagate HDD which has got through some unsuccessful windows and linux installations and now all the partition tables are corrupted... I tried to format with System>Administration>DiskUtility but it gives this error when I'm do: Error creating partition table: helper exited with exit code 1: Error calling fsync(2) on /dev/sdb: Input/output error gParted was not even useful since it didn't not even detected the drive...
Isn't there any simple way to format the crap from the Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD? I believe that on windows, there wouldn't be that problem since the "format c:" crap just format the drive without asking questions. All I want to do is to format the drive so I can create partitions later. Also, I have only access to the live CD and I don't have any Diskette drive installed.. I believe we now live in a world where this crap isn't needed to fix a computer.
Right clicking on a drive will format the drive but Disk Utility 2.30.1 included with Ubuntu 10.10 will not format the drive and says the drive is busy.
Opensuse 11.4 seems to be creating problems with booting from USB devices. (I have read in a couple places that people are having similar problems.)
Every time I try to boot from a different live USB image, I see a GRUB screen flash and the hard disk starts to boot up. The only live image I have had success with booting was another OpenSuse 11.4, then I got the options to install or run live. I was thinking of just wiping the hard disk and seeing if that made a difference. Can I get into the grub limited command line, can i format from here? Is some other way of installing over the WAN from inside the Suse OS?
Just ran into a problem involving mdadm, a disk which had been in a raid array, and an attempt to reformat. Basically, I went to reformat some partitions which had been in raid, and one of them threw the error andy@andy-desktop:~$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb5 mke2fs 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010) /dev/sdb5 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here! An attempt to umount revealed it was not mounted. lvdisplay and fuser did not reveal anything to me, so I just started looking around. I was graphically navigating /dev and noticed a /dev/md_d0 which did not look like /dev/md_d1 etc (it was missing a little arrow). I had not seen this notation before (my raid was md0), but figured it couldn't hurt to try stopping it.
andy@andy-desktop:~$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md_d0 mdadm: md device /dev/md_d0 does not appear to be active. andy@andy-desktop:~$ sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md_d0 mdadm: stopped /dev/md_d0
After this, the partition formatted fine! I saw a lot of instructions including zeroing the partition and removing a logical volume, but the above was the only thing which worked for me! Just posted it in case it helps someone else. I know I've not been terribly technical!
I am pretty new to Ubuntu and am practicing on an old desktop as a file print and domain controller for a work from home business while I build and configure a Linux server. My question is as follows: I have a laptop running windows 7, my wife has a MacPro running Snow Leopard, the kids have desk top running Ubuntu 10.04, I have a 500GB additional disk in the spare desktop which I want to use as a netork drive that will:
1) Win 7 backup location from the Laptop 2) Store backups of large photoshop files and other graphicsy type stuff from my wifes macpro. 3) Act as a shared directory for all of us 4) Store large multimedia files, mpegs etc
What is the best disk partition format - Am I restricted to NTFS due to the requirements to store Win 7 Backup files Secondly can anyone point me in the direction of a URL for getting the Samba permissions sorted for Windows 7, The kids PC dual boots Win XP and Ubuntu 10.04 Win XP is no problem to network but in Win 7 I can see all the shares in the network map but I always get permission errors both from the Ubuntu PC and Win 7 laptop. Most of the help files and manuals deal with 98/Me/XP and not windows vista / 7 that I can find.
I got a new hard drive 2TB for extending the storage. I am working on fedora15 and would like to format the disk as a linux partition and external hard drive. me how to format this disk and partitioning!
just got Fedora 15 up and running and i have a 2nd internal HDD which i want to use for backups only, how do i format it exactly, mount point? file system? I've tried few options but when i try to point at it with Deja Dup i can't access it?
When I try 'makebootdisk' and get to the 'format' stage, it tells me: "The attempt to format the floppy disk in /dev/fd0 has failed ..." The disk is fine, and can be read from, but the above msg. shows up instantly -- the light on the drive doesn't even come on. I'd expect this to be a routine problem but I can't find any solutions either here or on the web.
I have a server with two hard disks SATA (500 GB), I installed centos in one of them, desire to know how I can mount the other hard disk empty and without format, so that this hard disk always appears mounted when "reboot" the system.
Dell laptop booting from a USB stick with a CentOS 5.5 minimum installation.
Uncompressing Linux...OK, booting the kernel. Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.13 starting sda: assuming drive cache: write through sda: assuming drive cache: write through mount: error 6 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd-dev failed: 2 Kernel panic - no syncing: Attempted to kill init!
1. Does minimum installation not drop on a kernel or initrd with ext3 support? I can't imagine that's true, but have to ask.
2. The USB stick is single partition ext3. Maybe there is some limitation specifically related to USB stick booting that requires boot to be FAT16 or FAT32? Except the CentOS 5.5 installer refuses to let me install on either FAT.
3. How can I do the equivalent of lsmod on a linux installation that will not boot? i.e. I have CentOS x86_64 running in VirtualBox, I can plug the USB stick in there, so how do I get information on the USB stick's kernel and initrd if I can't boot from it?
4. Is it possible to rebuild the i386 based initrd on this USB stick, when the computer is not booted from that stick, with a system that's x86_64 based?
System Info: Dell Latitude i686 Laptop which has run CentOS 5.5 and Fedora 12,13,14 in the past, and boots from Fedora 14 Live CD transferred to a USB stick. So I know USB booting is possible on this machine, and this stick.
The process of creating the stick:
CentOS 5.5 i386 on a USB stick. Old Dell i686 laptop which has previously run CentOS 5.5 installed from DVD, and has successfully booted from this same USB stick holding transferred Fedora 12,13,14 Live CDs. CentOS 5.5 was installed onto the USB drive directly by the CentOS 5.5 DVD installer (running virtualized in VirtualBox 4.02 on Mac OS X 10.6.5.). No errors or complaints during installation.
For whatever reason, the installer did not do some things correctly. First Grub wasn't working correctly, I got that sorted out and have the Grub+CentOS splash screen, it finds vmlinuz and the initrd, and then I get a kernel panic.
Ext3 was built into the kernel and that's why I'm getting this message. I do not know how the installer would have dropped a kernel or initrd during instalation that that don't contain such a basic thing that obviously comes in linux kernel 2.6.18-89 EL.
