[ubuntu-uk] What to do if external hard drive isn't unmounted properly?

[Rowan Berkeley]

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 09:11 +0100, Avi Greenbury
<avismailinglistaccount at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Rowan Berkeley wrote:
> > It's NTFS. I originally put all the stuff on it from a Windows 
> > machine, which uses NTFS by default. I have experienced no problems
> > in using it on the newer Ubuntu machine. But once, I did power down
> > without unmounting it, and the next time I started it, it 
> > complained of an 'unclean demount'. The way I got out of it then was
> > by putting it back on the Windows machine and closing it down from 
> > there, but I don't want to have to do that in future, as I may not 
> > have a Windows machine to do it on.
> 
> In that case, you'll want to be using a Linux native filesystem, for 
> which repair tools exist in Linux. Ext3 or ext4 are likely a good bet,
> others may be more appropriate depending on what you intend to store
> on it and how you intend to access it. NTFS is a good option if you've
> a Windows PC for it to interact with. If there's no Windows about,
> life tends to be easier if you stick with Linux native filesystems.
> Unfortunately, there's no way to convert it, you'll be looking at
> copying files elsewhere to convert it, unless it's less than half
> full. Avi Greenbury

Aha, well, as it happens, it is less than half full. So I take it that
there is some procedure whereby I can create new and more
Ubuntu-friendly partitions on it alongside the NTFS ones and then move
all the files into them and finally delete the NTFS partitions? This
might take a while, but it would be worth doing if in future handling
the drive on Ubuntu machines will be much easier. It's a 500GB drive and
I have only 125GB in use currently. So please tell me where to go for
instructions on this. I'm glad I asked, now. Thanks, Avi.