Formatting

[cheshire057]

how do you Format a secondary hard drive with Fedora 8. i through another hard drive in it after i installed fedora but it says it cant mount hard disk. :(

[saikee]

First thing first a user mounts a partition and not a disk.

Second thing is a partition can only be mounted if it has a filing system inside. This means it must be formatted before it can be mounted.

You know the presence of the disk by command
fdisk -lthat works in any Linux.
To create a partition in say device sda you can use fdisk in a root terminal
fdisk /dev/sda
I think the command is "n" for new partition, then a number to indicate the partition number ("1" for creation of sda1). You then specify the beginning and finnishing cyclinder position and opt for "w" to write the partition table.

The partition sda1 is then ready for formatting. To make it a ext3 format is
mke2fs -j /dev/sda1whereas to make it a Fat32 is
mkdosfs -F32 /dev/sda1
To mount it is
mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

You always format a device but read or write a mounted filing system usually in /mnt directory. It becomes second nature if you understand the logic behind.

[Choozo]

There should be a GUI somewhere in Fedora to help you set up partitions and format them.

[mrrangerman43]

If you want to add a second hard drive to a linux system and you plan on it mounting at boot time this Howto (http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Hardware/Adding_a_Hard_Drive_in_Linux.html) is the one I first used.

[banzaikai]

Or, being this is the newbie section, you could take the easy route:

Hit "Applications -> System Tools -> GParted" and go from there.

If you do not have it listed, then:

Open up a terminal, and login as root
[banzai@blossom ~]$ su
Password:
[root@blossom banzai]#
Use yum to grab it
[root@blossom banzai]# yum install gparted
It should now be listed, go ahead and quit the terminal.

GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) allows both partitioning and formatting of drives. If the format scheme you want to use isn't installed (say, HFS), then you'll want to use something like yumex to grab the filesystem packages from the repos:

Open up a terminal, and login as root
[banzai@blossom ~]$ su
Password:
[root@blossom banzai]#
Use yum to grab yumex
[root@blossom banzai]# yum install yumex
It should now be listed beneath GParted in the menu, go ahead and quit the terminal, and launch yumex. Yumex is just a GUI frontend to yum, allowing you some versatility in using yum to manage your packages. To get the HFS utils, just type "hfs" in the search bar, and it'll display all packages that have this in the title or description. In our example, you should see "hfs-utils-1.2.3-i686.f8" (or similar) listed, and clicking on it will display the full info below. If this is the one, then hit the "Add to queue" or just check the box (depending on which version of yumex you have). Hit the "process Queue" button to install, and once done, the option in GParted should be available.

Note that not all systems read all formats. The best all-around format, despite the problems, happens to be FAT-32. If you're using this only for Linux, then go ahead and use ext3. I haven't played with F8 just yet, but I think it uses the new ntfs-3g util for WinNT-based kernels as standard. If not, then just yumex the ntfs-3g utils (you may have to activate the FreshRPMs repo for this - easy to do by using the FreshRPMs.net installer).

banzai "gui goodness" kai

[infiniphunk]

Another good one to use(and most distros have it) is cfdisk.

[cheshire057]

ok so i got Gparted and i selected my other hard drive i have in my computer and when i try to format it as a ntfs or ex2 or ex3 it gives me an error and says could not stat device sdb - no such file or directory? what do i do?

p.s. thank you all for your help.

[cheshire057]

and if i try the fdisk way in root, it says it can not find fdisk command, and that its not a command.

[saikee]

Red Hat family distros do not have "cfdisk" which I consider to be the best partitioning tool myself. In "cfdisk" place there is sfdisk but it is very similar to fdisk.

"fdisk" is available in every distro including Fedora 7. I expect it to be in Fedora 8 which I have not installed yet.

It is possible that fdisk has to be issued as
/sbin/fdisk -lor
/usr/sbin/fdisk -lIn any case one can find it by
find / -name fdisk
As a server-based distro a regular user is not given the /sbin path in Fedora. It is one of its characteristics.

[cheshire057]

:( you know i think the hard drive must just be corrupted because i just wrote it to zero with gwscan and then went into gparted and tryed to make a disklable and it even gave me an error. i dont know what else to try, i did the fdisk thing but i wasn't sure if i did it right thought (before i tried writing it to zero and making a disklable).

[saikee]

Unless your disk is an old unit and is at the end of its serviceable life it should appear in "fdisk -l" without any partition like any raw disk.

The capacity of the drive should tell us its capacity.

I never zero a disk myself and the disk will be usable immediately after it has been formatted.

If you think your disk is not doing the correct thing show us here the output of
fdisk -l

[banzaikai]

Does it even show up?

Make sure the BIOS sees the drive, and that the jumpers are set correctly. If this is a pre-fab computer (HP/Compaq, Dell, etc.), then you most likely have to set both to Cable Select (CS), and plug them in accordingly. If using a regular IDE cable (non-CS), you'll have to have one set as master (sda) and the other slave (sdb). If your sda is a Western Digital, they use the scheme where the master ALONE is unjumpered, when a slave drive is there, then the MST jumper is used.

Once that is confirmed, or you're using SATA, then you can use GParted to check things for you. Just select sdb, drop-down the "Partition" menu, and select "Check". You can ignore any "grow/resize" partition errors, if any.

As for the fdisk command, it's sitting in your /sbin/ directory... (at least on my FC6 box)
[banzai@blossom ~]$ /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 65 522081 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 66 196 1052257+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3 197 3268 24675840 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 3269 14593 90968062+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 3269 14593 90968031 83 Linux

(My Zip-100 drive)
Disk /dev/hdb: 100 MB, 100663296 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 12 96358+ b W95 FAT32

banzai "GKnackered" kai

[cheshire057]

the biggest problem i was having was when i was in Gparter it would not work, it found the hard drive and everything but when ever i would try and format it with Gparter it wouldn't work, i would hit apply and it would give me an error. and i did find the hard drive with fdisk but i had to do sbin/fdisk. i was just doing fdisk before, but when i tried to format it that way i think i did it wrong because it didn't work, im not use to doing command's and stuff sense iv only ever used windows, but my little brother helped me out with it and we did get the hard drive formated :) witch rocks and i thank you guys for all your help. is there any way do use fdisk and all the commands with out typing sbin? it seems i have to do it for almost every command.

p.s. is there a way to make it so when you open up a folder it doesnt always open in a new window?

[JohnT]

Ask each question as a single "New" topic for faster and more exacting answers.

[JohnT]

is there any way do use fdisk and all the commands with out typing sbin? it seems i have to do it for almost every command.


You have to set your PATH in your bash.rc file for your user shell to know which paths to use for executables.The default path is system-dependent, and is set by the administrator who installs bash.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/bash

[banzaikai]

p.s. is there a way to make it so when you open up a folder it doesnt always open in a new window?
Assuming you're using Nautilus, then open up your home directory (which is Nautilus), then:
- Select "Edit"
- Select "Preferences..."
- Hit the "Behavior" tab
- Select the checkbox that says "Always open in browser windows"

There's a whole bunch of other things in there - feel free to play around.
commands with out typing sbin?
If you're still in Nautilus, then:
- Select "View"
- Select "Show hidden Files" (or just use CTRL-H)
- Scroll through files in your home directory until you see ".bash_profile". You can just double-click on it to open it up with gedit and add:
# .bash_profile
# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
# User specific environment and startup programs

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/sbin/ #<- right here (in red)!

export PATH
and save it back (gedit will automatically save the old file for you if you mess up). Once done, you can toggle off the hidden file view. Changes should take effect the next time you login.

banzai "broken shells" kai