1 Topic by BravoGolf

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Topic: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

Hi all. I have an external HDD that I want to format to ext3 (currently formatted to "Unix file system" according to the Mac (OS X 10.4.9).

So, I've installed GParted using parallels desktop and got an error during the LiveCD install stating that "The graphical environment configuration should have been done automaticaly. Unfortunately, it did no. since you are back to the bash!"

The forcevideo doesn't work, I imagine that may due to using Parallels

From there, I ran fdisk -l and it displayed my external ok but when I reboot it's no longer there.

What steps must I now undertake to format the HDD? Am totally lost sad My genuine apologies if this has been asked billions of times!

2 Reply by BravoGolf

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

Hmm, got the video part working by selecting a force video option Vesa when booting up, but the device is still not found sad dmesg says the device not accepting address and goes through each IRQ or something sad

3 Reply by LarryT

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

You just have to plug your usb device AFTER the system is ok, and desktop opened.
This probably come from fstab, which doesn't contains right values...

Larry
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Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

4 Reply by BravoGolf

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

LarryT wrote:

You just have to plug your usb device AFTER the system is ok, and desktop opened.
This probably come from fstab, which doesn't contains right values...

Lol, as simple as that eh? Man, I spent hours on getting this sorted!

Plugging in after booting up GParted worked fine, thank you

5 Reply by LarryT

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

Anyway be carefull with external usb drive : it usually takes a*VERY* long time to create partitions. Don't think of coying ....or, prepare you to free a compete week wink

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

6 Reply by BravoGolf

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

LarryT wrote:

Anyway be carefull with external usb drive : it usually takes a*VERY* long time to create partitions. Don't think of coying ....or, prepare you to free a compete week wink

Funnily enough it flew through. Originally, my HDD was formatted to a Unix file system (via Mac OS X 10.4.9) but it didn't appear to format in Gparted at all, kept working for a bit and bringing back errors.
So, I reformatted on Windows to NTFS and then downloaded a package on Ubuntu at work to read/write NTFS and formatted the drive to EXT3 via Gparted. Worked fine, didn't take long, about 5 minutes in total (I right clicked on device after unmounting, selected Format To and EXT3)

\o/

7 Reply by LarryT

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Re: How to format an external hard drive using GParted?

nice.

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)