Configuration tool for formatting and mounting hard drives?

[Yuan Qi]

gparted is a gtk+ utility for managing partiitons. qtparted is a qt 
utility for managing partitions. The latter is more mature.

Martin Alderson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Firstly thanks for Hoary. Fantastic distro!
> 
> My request would be some sort of integrated tool to mount and format new 
> HDDs.
> 
> I was slightly disappointed when I put a new hard drive in this computer 
> only to find that Ubuntu didn't do anything when it found it. I was 
> hoping that it would notice it and help me set it up, at least in a 
> console mode.
> 
> To install it I had to apt-get gparted which was fantastic for 
> formatting it. Great program.
> 
> The main problem arisen when it was time to mount it. I made a new 
> folder for it (/Movies), and mounted it with the 'mount' command. Great 
> - it all works. Start copying stuff to it and set downloads to it. A 
> while passes and I reboot the computer for some reason, start it up 
> again and suddenly I'm getting bombarded with disk space low errors - of 
> course I had forgotten to add it to the fstab and I was downloading 
> stuff to it, little did I realise that it wasn't mounted and it was 
> quickly filling up my 'other' hdd. I added it to the fstab and all was 
> well, but to a newer user this would of been a nightmare and if I didn't 
> know what fstab was it would be likely that I would of assumed that the 
> hard drive had died or something.
> 
> So what do I suggest?
> 
> Firstly a message at startup that a new hard drive has been detected. I 
> don't think it's a good idea to try and set it up while in startup as 
> the console isn't great for portioning and to many it is scary.
> 
> Secondly, a program similar to Windows XP's 'disk management console'. I 
> think this is a pretty excellent way to do it, one program for 
> portioning, formatting and mounting hard drives. This would make it easy 
> to format the hard drive, mount it and add it to the fstab. I hope most 
> of the people on this list agrees that it's no acceptable to have users 
> edit the fstab if they add a new hard drive.
> 
> 
> Ok, while reading this I notice that a hard drive icon has been added to 
> the 'computer' in GNOME and when I click it it says 'cannot mount disk 
> drive'. Is it likely that this would do what I asked for and I either 
> didn't notice it (if so, it needs to be made more obvious) or I had to 
> partition the hdd first (if so, then a simple to use partition tool is 
> needed, gparted for example, but with a different name). I still think a 
> disk management console would be good though.
>