HOWTO: Format a Western Digital USB hard drive as ext3, with automount

[watchpocket]

You'll now be presented with the graphical display of the existing partition. Select it, then hit the big Delete button. Select the new unallocated gray space, and hit the New button. Choose ext3 as the new filesystem,

I'm trying to format (for Karmic) a Western Digital 320GB "My Passport Studio" external drive, model WDMT3200TN. It handles FireWire 800 & 400, and USB 2.0.

GParted presents me with three (pre-formatted) partitions on this disk.

For the first small (31.50 KiB) partition ( /dev/sdb1 -- whose file system is "unknown" ) I get it that I can delete this one, in fact, "Delete" is the only choice I have that's not grayed-out for this partition.

I then have the gray unallocated second partition (128.00MiB), for which "New" is the only choice that's not grayed-out. (Also, this is the only one of the three partitions for which "New" IS an available choice).

For the third, much larger, partition (297.97 GiB), ( /dev/sdb3, formatted for the MacOS hfs+ file system ), the choices GParted offers are "Delete," "Resize/Move" and "Copy."

Should I simply delete the large hfs+ partition as well as the first small "unknown" one? (I definitely don't want hfs+.) Is it okay to have just one large partition, made from the unallocated partition? (I'm only using this drive on Ubuntu -- for backups and maybe photo or music collections. I won't be using it with windows or mac or other OSes.)

Also, when I create the new partition using the "New" button, should I create it as "Primary Partition" or as "Extended Partition" ?

And in what situation would I want to use "Linux-swap" as the file system? Should I create a smaller partition for some swap or free space? ( If so, maybe that's the partition that should use a "Linux-swap" fs.)

And finally, why ext3 instead of ext4? I may go with ext4 unless someone has a reason not to.

I am (quite obviously) new to partitioning and formatting on Ubuntu. Thanks for any tips.

[todb]

Should I simply delete the large hfs+ partition as well as the first small "unknown" one? (I definitely don't want hfs+.) Is it okay to have just one large partition, made from the unallocated partition? (I'm only using this drive on Ubuntu -- for backups and maybe photo or music collections. I won't be using it with windows or mac or other OSes.)

I would. There are some reasons to have multiple partitions, but unless you are supernaturally organized with your data (or have different permissions needs) I wouldn't bother.

Also, when I create the new partition using the "New" button, should I create it as "Primary Partition" or as "Extended Partition" ?

Does GParted make this distinction obvious? (I don't recall). Since you're only going with one partition, it doesn't much matter. Go with Primary.

And in what situation would I want to use "Linux-swap" as the file system? Should I create a smaller partition for some swap or free space?

On a portable drive like this, never -- if you designate a swap partition, you will have lots more writes at unknown times, and if you're like me and always yanking the cable out without being a good computing citizen and umounting, you will certainly screw up the disk. If you're more familiar with Microsoft architecture, a swap partition to linux is what a paging file is to Windows.

And finally, why ext3 instead of ext4? I may go with ext4 unless someone has a reason not to.

No particular reason. Other people on this thread are happy with their ext4's.

[watchpocket]

I decided to go with the ext3 file system since it's also what my Ubuntu box's internal HD uses.

However I ran into two problems:

When I tried to delete the first small partition, I got this when I hit "Apply" :

"libparted messages: Partition map has no partition map entry!" and it wouldn't delete.

And when I hit "New" to create a new empty partition from the unallocated one, I got this: "libparted messages: Can't have overlapping partitions."

I was able to delete the third large hfs+ partition with no problem.

Not sure what to do, but somehow the "unknown" partition has to become "known" and able to be read. Any and all suggestions welcome.

[Edit] Googling around on the error messages, looks like I should just try to write the partition table and/or try to change that first block to ext3 or whatever. I'll try this later when I'm home.

[chris.olive]

That looked really simple, and I would try it with my Compaq laptop and blue ring W/D drive, but for one problem.
Unbuntu will not recognize the drive, I can access it via "window shares" but when I plug it into USB port nothing shows, am I doing something wrong?
Lucid on this machine and a new desktop, but no joy on either, GParted does not locate it either.
Any ideas please.

[yasmar]

Thanks for the helpful instructions.

Instead of changing ownership of the drive (step 6), you could just open up the permissions:
sudo chmod a+w /media/labelname

I think this would be a more standard solution.

[chris.olive]

Still no joy, the drive is still not recognized by Ubuntu plugged in to the Ethernet or USB just does not exist.
Am going to try to remove the case and plug it in through my other external H/D case, this worked when wiping a friends corrupted windows drive, if I can work out how it comes apart.

Some days later; removed the case and swapped the drive over to another case, used "disk utility" to clean format drive, then set it to ext 4 and decided to leave it there, after trying it back in it's old case.
where it still refused to work, guess there mus be something in the hardware.
Works fine in a different case so happy now.